Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Analysis

The Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Analysis (LPA) is born on 1st October 2006. To develop its research section is nowadays its principal worry, based on two pillars:

• bioelectrochemical study of molecules of pharmaceutical interest, development of biosensors and microbioreactors
• biomimetic predictive investigations of the metabolic pathways based on the on-line coupling of electrochemistry (EC) and mass spectrometry (MS).

Trough these hybrid techniques, LPA aims to contribute partially to tackle the enormous defy constituted by the amount of new molecules created day by day from organic and in silico synthesis. To determine as early as possible the metabolic and toxicological profiles of new drug candidates with simple and efficient techniques represents a hard challenge of the 21st century in pharmaceutical research. The newly up-coming combination of EC and MS offers an accurate identification of oxidation products. This pure instrumental concept is able to mimic non-exhaustively the CYP450 system, as well as for metabolites identifications than for glutathione adducts recognition. Providing useful information about oxidation products or adducts permits to EC/MS or EC/LC/MS set-up to bring new tools to decision makers at an early phase of the development process.

Cells based or enzymatic biosensors and bioreactors involving (or not) magnetic nanobeads are also among the innovative predicting methods considered by LPA. The boom of screen printed electrodes and the integration of magnetic bioreactors in a flow system represent opportunities in this thinking way. Focusing again on the on-line metabolites generation and identification, LPA hopes to enlarge the predictive tools arsenal for the exploration of the metabolic pathways and to achieve a more accurate understanding of metabolic mechanisms, closer to the in vivo situation.

Both of the proposed concepts may be transferred to high throughput screening desiderata.

LPA would like to meet eventual academic or industrial partners sharing similar points of view or goals and ready to collaborate in order to answer jointly in a common project to subsiding calls related to the above exposed topics.