Supported liquid extraction as a technique for the clean-up of hair extracts containing drug of abuse

Supported liquid extraction (SLE) has been successfully used for the determination of drugs in conventional matrices, such as blood and urine. In the SLE process the sample is pH adjusted and then loaded in an aqueous phase, to ensure the analytes of interest load as a neutral compounds. The aqueous phase is immobilized on an inert diatomaceous earth based support material and the water immiscible organic phase flows through the support eluting the compounds of interest. As a result recoveries are often higher, with better reproducibility and cleaner extracts within 15 minutes.

This poster determines SLE to be a suitable alternative clean-up method for hair extracts containing drugs of abuse compared to traditional SPE methods. It can be seen in the results of this study that the SLE method of extraction provided better extraction efficiency than SPE for hair samples containing opiates and cocaine including its major metabolite.