ABSTRACT
Advances in liquid chromatographic column technology, instrumentation, automation, and supportive software have greatly enhanced the applications of liquid chromatography (LC) for the clinical, pharmaceutical, and research laboratories. This chapter examines some related advances in liquid chromatography LC that have been or may be readily applied to offer cost-effective and sensitive analysis for drugs and poisons, complementary to immunoassays. It addresses the status of automation in LC and the various approaches of Direct-sample analysis (DSA), followed by published examples; and the principle of microcolumn chromatography and selected clinical examples for toxicology and therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM). For toxicology and TDM assays such as theophylline and ethanol when performed by high throughput analyzers, automation offers efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Automation in the clinical laboratory, as proposed by M. Sasaki and others is increasingly vital to the survival of a cost-effective laboratory.
