New Validated Analytical Workflow for Complex Quantitation of Veterinary Drugs

Food scientists can now take advantage of a newly-launched, start-to-finish solution that offers robust, reliable and sensitive analysis of multi-residue veterinary drugs in complex animal-derived sample matrices, helping identify animal and dairy products that may be unsafe for human consumption.

The Thermo Scientific VetDrugs Explorer Collection is a single-provider, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS)-based solution that enables the quantitation required to meet current regulatory standards of more than 160 veterinary drugs in analytically challenging sample matrices.

"There is a global effort to monitor and control the use of veterinary drugs in animal-derived food production for consumer safety, and to reduce the growing problems associated with antibiotic resistance," said Dipankar Ghosh, director, applied technologies, chromatography and mass spectrometry, Thermo Fisher Scientific. "The VetDrugs Explorer Collection provides customers with a single, pre-tested, all-encompassing solution for the robust and productive testing of animal and dairy products for multi-residue veterinary drugs."

"Setting up an end-to-end workflow for the quantitation of multi-residue veterinary drugs typically requires a significant commitment of resources and often presents a number of analytical challenges," said David J. Borts, Ph.D., Veterinary Diagnostic and Production Animal Medicine section leader, Analytical Chemistry Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, Iowa State University. "By integrating the VetDrugs Explorer Collection into our organization, we have rapidly expanded our quantitation capabilities to detect over 200 veterinary drugs, with this solution operating at a rapid pace and at a reduced cost, while avoiding the challenges associated with setting up a similar workflow independently."

The comprehensive VetDrugs Explorer Collection includes:

• The QuEChERS (Quick Easy Cheap Effective Rugged Safe) kit for simple and reproducible sample preparation

• High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) column with chemistry specific for the detection of veterinary drugs

• Robust and high-throughput LC-MS/MS for excellent uptime and reliability

• Triple quadrupole mass spectrometer for fast, sensitive and accurate quantitation of analytes in a variety of matrices

• Extensive built-in compound database for the screening, quantifying and reporting of samples

The application of the VetDrugs Explorer Collection is designed to help limit the aberrant use of veterinary drugs in agriculture, including antibiotics, β-agonists and steroids, by supplying food safety laboratories, government agencies and contract organizations with a solution that can help them monitor, detect and report these drugs to appropriate authorities in a robust, productive and cost-effective manner.

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