Our lab is looking to a GC-MS/MS system, mainly for intensifying the constituents of impure samples, recently we have also been looking into ways to do more metabolomics studies to study the pharmacodynamics of various untested pharmaceutical drugs.

Of course the cheapest option would be to acquire a small scale HPLC prep system to get a preliminary idea of how many component the sample contains. Those that are abundant in significant amount would then be purified and structurally identified with GC-MS and or GC-MS/MS.

Since we are a small lab, budged is always an issue and we pretty much are limited to looking to preowned options. This means that the natural choice from that perspective might be a triple quad MS,
since they are widely available.

On the other hand, in light of the planned metabolomics and pharmacokinetics work, I'm a little worried that a quadrupole mass analyzer may not give good data for trace analytes (especially for thins like measuring the blood levels of certain markers or for identifying metabolites that were excreted via urine.

Does anyone know if a basic Triple quad GC-MS/MS system should work in most cases, or if a tandem quadrupole ion trap tandem MS may be needed to be able to so as. to not run the risk of missing some important biomarkers.

(Sorry is this a very basic question). Unfortunately no one in our team has much experience with analytical pharmacodynamics, but my hunch is that blood serum markers, and first past metabolites are only present in very small quantities in these fluids so a sensitive analyzer capable of characterizing compounds that might be needed here?

I appreciate any tips you could give me since we don't want to rush into something only to find out too late that it doesn't work :roll:

Thank you all in advance, and feel free to contact me directly if you want to know more or just chet.