My first week of the WEP will be spent at Integrated Lab Solutions, a laboratory that specializes in drug toxicology. Today, I sat in on their weekly lab meeting, got a tour of the office and facilities and an introduction to some of the things that they do for their clients. Their clients consist of different medical clinics in North Carolina, Georgia, and many other locations. The first half of the day I shadowed the Chief Science Officer and observed him review all of the collected data so that any false positives/negatives could be filtered out before sending back to their clients. In this process, I learned all about the method that they use to detect all of the different drugs (liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry) and how the data is read to ensure accurate results. The different components of the urine sample are separated when they pass through silica particles coated in hydrophobic oils. Retention time and ion size of the drug are then used by the software to confirm the identity of the detected drug after it had passes through the different chambers of the machine. After all of the data has been collected, it is reviewed by a human to ensure accuracy. If there is doubt in the results, the concentration metabolite of the drug (metabolized counterpart) is referred to in order to either confirm or deny the presence of the drug. If the data is inconclusive or inconsistent, then a second test will be run.
The second half of my day I watched some of the lab personnel prepare cuvettes and sample trays to be tested later. The sample trays were loaded with different calibrating solutions, quality control solutions, a control solution, and then the samples to be tested. An internal standard was added to each cuvette of urine sample to make the data readings by the machine more accurate. They were then incubated, and spun in the centrifuge to finalize the preparation. 