September 2008 www.thecolumn.eu.com The Column Q&A Highly Sensitive The Column’s Alasdair Matheson spoke to Rohan Thakur from Thermo Fisher Scientific about the company’s rationale behind developing the TSQ Vantage — a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer — for high sensitivity bioanalysis. Why was the TSQ Vantage developed? This instrument was developed to meet the high sensitivity demands required for bioanalysis by Big Pharma, biotech and contract research organizations (CROs) who need to quantify small amounts of highly potent new drug entities in biological matrices. The sensitivity performance of available triple stage quadrupole technology was insufficient to study the pharmacokinetic profiles of these highly potent new drugs and their metabolites. The industry required a triple stage quadrupole instrument that delivered significantly higher sensitivity without substantially increasing the level of chemical noise, so that accurate and precise quantitative data could be obtained in real samples. The new mass spectrometer delivers the extra sensitivity required for the bioanalysis of small molecules and biomolecules in matrices such as urine, plasma and serum. The Figure 1: An overlay of five standard curves in spiked rat plasma, sampled during the analysis of 1000 rat plasma samples over a five-day period. 0.6 0.5 Area ratio 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 R2 0.9996 Concentration (pg/mL) Contact: Rohan Thakur E-mail: analyze@thermofisher.com 23
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Column - September 2008