Metabolite Profiling of Novel Psychoactive Substances

Dear Colleagues,

Novel psychoactive substances (NPSs) have flooded the illicit drug market for almost two decades, either as alternatives to or adulterants of traditional drugs of abuse, attempting to reduce manufacturing and processing costs and evade legal controls and analytical detection. NPSs pose a tremendous threat to public health as they have caused thousands of deaths worldwide and due to their societal and legislative implications. Moreover, the turnover is also high: new NPSs emerge regularly on drug markets to replace newly banned substances or produce ever-more-potent psychotropic drugs.

Little to no pharmacological data are available on NPSs when they first surface on the market, which creates concerns as users are unaware of the potential risks associated with their consumption. From an analytical point of view, methods must be constantly updated to adapt to market dynamics, but NPSs are often challenging to detect as they may be active at extremely low concentrations in biological matrices and may undergo substantial metabolic degradation. Assessing the pharmacokinetics of NPSs is, therefore, essential to be able to document their consumption in clinical and forensic casework. In particular, the metabolic profiling of NPSs is a major step toward identifying the specific metabolite biomarkers of consumption that may be more easily detected than the corresponding parent drug.

This Special Issue of Metabolites is dedicated to studies on the metabolism of NPSs. This includes, but is not limited to, the identification of NPS metabolite biomarkers through in vitro (e.g., hepatocyte or liver microsome incubations) or in vivo models (e.g., controlled administration to rats), the reporting of authentic clinical or forensic cases with metabolite identification/quantification in biological specimens, the development of new analytical approaches for NPS metabolite profiling, and literature reviews on NPS metabolism.

Dr. Jeremy Carlier
Prof. Dr. Volker Auwärter
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Metabolites is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• new psychoactive substances
• metabolism
• case report
• clinical toxicology
• forensic toxicology