Pauline Vollmerhaus

Drug discovery scientists are continually striving to improve productivity and efficiency in their workflows. From early discovery to clinical development, existing workflow bottlenecks represent an opportunity to develop solutions to speed the process and improve productivity. The key requirements for quantitative analysis are precision, accuracy, and linear dynamic range. With any quantitative instrument, the hope is that it will be applicable to a vast range of coumpounds, ruggest, and fast. New mass spectrometry (MS) technologies are being developed that meet these criteria and permit high throughput while enabling its application to areas in which speed limitations previously curtailed its practicality. In particular, in the area of ADME profiling, new MS platforms are becoming available that increase the throughput by at least 25-fold, by combining the speed of matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) with the specificity of triple-quadrupole MS. This is bound to greatly accelerate the ADME..