70th AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo attendees interested in liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOF MS) will be able to watch a live demo of this method to detect drugs of abuse. Two toxicology experts from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) who will be on-site at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center will connect remotely with a UCSF emergency physician and the co-medical director of the California Poison Control System to demonstrate a toxicology case during a scientific session.
“Comprehensive toxicology testing is available through national reference laboratories. However, because test results are not available for 2 to 5 days, medical decisions regarding therapy or patient triage must be made in the absence of such data. This has proven to be a less than ideal a medical situation,” according to the faculty for (32411) Real Time Toxicology Testing and Case Discussion for Drugs of Abuse. The scientific session, which will take place from 12:30 to 2 p.m. on July 30, is worth 1.5 CE hours.
San Francisco General Hospital’s (SFGH) toxicology laboratory has discovered the benefits of using LC-QTOF MS to provide immediate data results referred by Bay Area hospitals to poison control centers in California. “LC-high resolution MS (usually with dilute and shoot) enables us to perform a comprehensive toxicology analysis (hundreds of targeted compounds) in serum and urine in real time, with results available in 30 minutes,” session presenters Alan Wu, PhD, director of clinical chemistry and toxicology at UCSF and Kara Lynch, PhD, associate professor at UCSF’s department of laboratory medicine, told CLN Stat. Older MS technologies such as gas chromatography-MS require extraction and derivatization and cannot be done as quickly, they added.
Joining them remotely will be Craig Smollin, MD, co-medical director of the California Poison Control System-San Francisco Division and Kathy Vo, MD, assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at UCSF.
During the session, Wu and Lynch will present a real case to poison control toxicologists while Smollin will perform comprehensive serum and urine testing live. All four speakers will be blinded to the drugs involved. Vo and Smollin will discuss a drug differential diagnosis as the audience watches the testing process and then discuss the outcome of the case.
This session will be similar in format to a presentation the group made at the 2017 meeting of the AACC Northern California Local Section, but involving a new case, according to Wu and Lynch.
Don’t miss out on this live action toxicology presentation using advanced MS technology. Register now to attend the 70th AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo July 29–August 2 in Chicago.