Metabolite Profiling of Novel Psychoactive Substances
A special issue of Metabolites (ISSN 2218-1989). This special issue belongs to the section "Pharmacology and Drug Metabolism".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2025 | Viewed by 2601
Special Issue Editors
Interests: clinical/forensic toxicology; analytical chemistry; pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics; drugs of abuse; phytotoxins
Special Issue Information
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
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Keywords
- new psychoactive substances
- metabolism
- case report
- clinical toxicology
- forensic toxicology
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