ABSTRACT
Analysis of biological material for bronchodilators, anticonvulsants, antiarrhythmics, antifolates, chloramphenicol, sedatives, analgesics, and tranquilizers accounts for the bulk of therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) and toxicology (TOX) workload in many laboratories. Both immunoassays and chromatographic techniques, with their typical benefits and shortcomings, have found a place in the analytical arena for these drug groups. Gas chromatography (GC) is more broadly applied in TOX screen programs, and liquid chromatography (LC) is the main analytical alternative to immunoassays for TDM. The principle advantage of chromatographic techniques is that they simultaneously resolve parent compounds, their metabolites, and chemically and therapeutically unrelated drugs. They have several common disadvantages, including laborious and time-consuming sample preparation, different pretreatment prior to GC and LC, and separate chromatographic conditions for the different drug groups.
