Articles and Links

TDM of Immunosuppressants

There are many articles reviewing therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of immunosuppressant medications. Below are links to articles from various peer-reviewed journals supporting the evidence that immunosuppressants are best monitored by high performance liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (abbreviated as HPLC-MS/MS or LC-MS/MS or HPLC/MS). In comparison to the commonly used immunoassays, LC-MS/MS demonstrates higher precision. See Links:

Improved Therapeutic Drug Monitoring of Tacrolimus (FK506) by
Rapid Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry Routine
Lack of Specificity of Cyclosporine Immunoassays

HomeTrak - Self-Administered Sample Collection for Theapeutic Drug Monitoring

Dr. Hooper and TMS BioScience have implemented HomeTrak, a proprietary system where patients can draw their blood samples by self-administered finger-stick and ship the sample to TMS BioScience Lab for analysis. Dr. Hooper and TMS BioScience have implemented HomeTrak, a proprietary system where patients can draw their blood samples by self-administered finger-stick and ship the sample to TMS BioScience Lab for analysis. In addition, the frequent testing required to maintain adequate monnitoring of immunosuppressants creates a situtaion where transplant patients must routinely go to a clinic or lab for a blood draw for the rest of their lives - often twice a month.This responsibility is burdensome and difficult to comply with, especially if a patient has successful re-entered the workforce or continued their education. Several articles demonstrate the clinical analytic equivalence of capillary blood samples from finger-stick versus venous samples drawn from the arm vein. TMS BioScience has performed studies that support this conclusion. Capillary samples are interchangeable with venous samples for TDM of immunosuppressants. TMS BioScience utilizes LC-MS/MS instruments that require a very small blood sample for testing. Only 50 microliters of blood is used for a sample - this is 1/20th of a milliliter - or about a drop in volume (metric drop = 50 microliters or 1/20th millilter in Pharmacy practice). Such a small sample volume allows the realistic method of monitoring drug levels from capillary samples which 200 microliters in size. By using overnight courier services, TMS BioScience provides accurate and reliable monitoring of immunosuppressants in transplant patients while allowing a freedom and quality of life heretofore not available to transplant patients.See links to articles

Home fingerprick sampling for immunosuppressant drug monitoring
Blackwell Synergy: Clin Transplant, Vol 0, Issue 0, pp ...