( Jason S. Wood Ph.D. Varian ...)Detection of Morphine and Morphine-Glucuronide in Saliva or Urine with a Rapid and Simple Method Without Derivatization on the Varian 500-MS

Jason S. Wood, Ph.D. Varian, Inc.

Introduction

Testing for drugs of abuse (DoA) is becoming more prevalent in various environments, including forensics and social justice environments as well as in sporting events. Non-heroin opiates such as morphine, oxycodone, and hydrocodone are appearing increasingly in drug indicator data. For example, in San Francisco, the number of emergency department mentions of oxycodone overdose increased 110 percent in a one year peroid between 2001 and 2002¹. A US Department of Justice report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2004 showed that the top four drugs utilized by high school seniors (and the percentage of those reporting their use in the last 12 months) were: 1) Alcohol (70.6%), 2) Marijuana (34.3%), 3) Stimulants (10.0%) and 4) Non-heroin Opiates (9.5%)². Moreover, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (USDEA) reports that since 1990, there has been about a 3-fold increase in morphine products in the United States3.

This application note describes a rapid (5 min), dilute-and-shoot method for the determination of morphine and one of its major metabolites (morphine-glucuronide) in biological fluids (saliva and urine). This method has the advantage that it does not require lengthy derivatization processes (as in GC/MS) and, therefore, can be used in a high-throughput screen environment. It utilizes the advanced features of the Varian 500-MS to divert salts and contaminating proteins away from the API ion source and includes Varians patented OnTrak OraTube as a sampling mechanism for the saliva.

Instrumentation

Varian 500-MS LC Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer equipped with an ESI source

Two Varian ProStar 210 Solvent Delivery Modules

CTC Analytics HTS PAL AutoSampler

Materials and Reagents

All chemica
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