HybridSPE(TM)-Precipitation Technology Wins SelectScience.net 2009 Scientists' Choice Award for Best New Separations Product in 2008

Supelco, a division of Sigma-Aldrich, and a leading supplier of chromatography products for analysis and purification, announces that its HybridSPE-Precipitation technology has won the SelectScience.net 2009 Scientists' Choice Award for Best New Separations Product in 2008. SelectScience.net is one of the leading online resources for applied chemists, clinical chemists and life scientists. The Scientists' Choice Award was based on an independent poll of over 25,000 scientists within the SelectScience.net community. The award was announced at Pittcon 2009 held recently in Chicago, IL.

"The advent of LC-MS technology has resulted in a wealth of benefits in terms of analysis speed and sensitivity, but sample prep still was a bottleneck within the overall bioanalytical process," said An Trinh, Product Manager of Sample Prep at Supelco. "Our goal was to deliver a new and innovative sample prep platform that would be simple enough in use to employ in a high throughput setting while simultaneously improving the overall quality of the researchers' data. We are very happy to learn that our efforts have been recognized by the scientific community."

HybridSPE-Precipitation (HybridSPE-PPT) technology is a simple and generic sample preparation platform designed for the gross level removal of endogenous protein and phospholipid interferences from biological plasma and serum prior to LC-MS or LC-MS/MS analysis.

In pharmaceutical bioanalysis, researchers develop and run various assays to quantitate drugs, pharmaceutical candidates, and metabolites in biological fluids such as serum and plasma. Excessive background from endogenous matrix components has always been a great concern in quantitative bioanalysis, and has become paramount with decreasing analytical run times. In bioanalytical mass spectrometry, the issue of excessive background contributes to the growing problem of ion-suppression.

One of the major causes of ion-suppression in bioanalysis is the presence of phospholipids during LC-MS or LC-MS-MS analysis in the positive ion electrospray mode (+ESI). Phospholipids are the second largest lipid component in biological matrices after triglycerides, and are typically present in extremely high concentrations in biological plasma samples.