2021 Volume 26 Issue 1 Pages 91-102
Supported liquid extraction (SLE) is commonly used to avoid emulsion formation; however, it takes a long time to concentrate the eluate and it is difficult to use in multiple samples. To solve these problems, automation of SLE has been previously reported, but no paper has reported the automation of the entire pretreatment operation in one apparatus. Therefore, we applied ATLAS-LEXT, an automated pretreatment apparatus developed to fully automate liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), to SLE and investigated the full automation of the pretreatment operation in a blood drug analysis. Blood samples containing 18 benzodiazepines and 16 other psychotropic drugs were pretreated with ATLAS-LEXT and analyzed using liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS). For all benzodiazepines tested, the calibration curves showed good linearity within the range of 10-500 ng/mL, and the recovery rate was ≥79%. For the other psychotropic drugs, the calibration curve showed good linearity within the range of 10-500 ng/mL, although the recovery rate was low for some analytes. In conclusion, the present study suggests that ATLAS-LEXT is useful for the pretreatment of blood samples for drug analysis using SLE, which has been impossible to fully be automated until now.
