NEW -  improved stability

The improved enzyme formulation results in a significantly better reagent stability after reconstitution.

• On board reagent storage at up to 15°C is possible now
  
• Reagents are stable on board up to 2 months
• Less re-calibrations are required now
  

This allows a more efficient and economic use of this easy to perform enzymatic assay, and opens the door to offer a real 24/7 service to your customer.

..

Background

The quantitative detection of the abuse/intoxication of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) also known as liquid Ecstasy is still a challenge in Toxicology.

To date, GHB is not detected by routine blood or urine drug screens. Its detection is virtually only possible with chromatographic methods. These methods are time-consuming and laborious since they often require derivatization of the drug and/or sample extraction. Therefore many cases involving GHB may be missed in hospitals and forensic institutes.

This situation causes a permanent under-estimation of the amount of this kind of severe intoxications or the inappropriate care of victims. Clearly, there is a requirement for simple and rapid analytical procedures to meet current increased demand for analysis.

The BÜHLMANN enzymatic GHB assay will allow a direct, quick and easy quantification of exogenous intake of GHB.

Principle of the Assay

GHB is converted to its metabolite by the action of GHB-specific recombinant enzyme and oxidized nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+). The increase in absorbance at 340 nm resulting from the reduction of NAD+ into NADH is proportional to the amount of GHB in the sample. The enzymatic GHB assay is a three reagent test which can be applied on every clinical chemistry analyzer allowing these settings.

Several evaluations showed comparable sensitivity and a very high correlation to the well established but laborious GC-MS methods.

* Multilingual document [EN, DE, FR, IT, ES]