Special Issue "Recent Trends in Analytical Methods for Identifying Drug Metabolites"

Dear Colleagues,

Drugs are chemical substances that produce a biological effect and are administrated or used in a wide range of contexts. Therefore, the study of drug metabolism, including the identification and quantification of drug metabolites, is of great interest for several purposes. In the case of pharmaceutical drugs, drug metabolism determines the duration and intensity of their pharmacologic action, so understanding it is essential to establish adequate medical treatment. It provides knowledge about phase I and/or II metabolism of a drug, contributing to unveil their mechanism of action or possible drug–drug interactions, among other factors, which have a great impact on drug development. In addition, it is also particularly important to understand the metabolic fate of abuse drugs, as it can be of great relevance in police investigations of different crimes. In a doping control framework, knowledge about the metabolism of performance-enhancing drugs is necessary to efficiently detect their illegal use in sports competitions.

It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in this Special Issue of Separations entitled “Recent Trends in Analytical Methods for Identifying Drug Metabolites”. This Special Issue presents the latest advances in the analysis of drug metabolites in various fields, addressing the development of drugs for medical purposes, doping control, new drugs of abuse, etc. Within this framework, this Special Issue covers recent analytical methods focused on the determination of metabolites of pharmaceutical, abuse and/or performance-enhancing drugs in biological samples from in vitro or in vivo studies. The scope is broad, and the submission of research papers and reviews covering those analytical methods based, among others, on chromatographic and related separation techniques (e.g., capillary electrophoresis), mass spectrometry and hyphenated techniques (e.g., ion mobility spectrometry), spectroscopic techniques, or biosensors is encouraged. New sample preparation protocols are also of special interest, since the extraction of metabolites in complex biological samples is one of the main challenges of the metabolite analysis. Finally, this Special Issue also includes metabolomics approaches as a novel strategy to study the mode of action of drugs, which has an impact on the development of pharmacologically analogous drugs, or to discover the consumption of novel abuse drugs not previously reported, but showing an identical or similar mode of action of known abuse drugs.

Dr. Maykel Hernández-Mesa
Dr. Francisco J. Lara
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 papers will be 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. Separations 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 1800 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.

• pharmacological drugs
• abuse drugs
• biological samples
• sample treatment
• mass spectrometry
• biosensors
• metabolomics