Today, on August 28, 2020, Ruta Hecht and Max Hecht defended successfully their PhD theses!

The dissertation by Ruta was titled “Novel eluent additives for LC-MS based bioanalytical methods”. In this thesis, novel fluoroalcoholic eluent additives that showed to have a positive influence on analyte ionisation in the MS source were studied. Additionally, two practical applications employing novel eluent additives were developed and validated for several pharmaceuticals. The two bioanalytical methods were used to obtain data for pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies in paediatric patients. Both methods reached exceptionally low limits of quantification, with minimal sample amount used due to the positive influence of novel eluent additives on analyte ionisation.

The PhD thesis by Max titled “Advances in the development of a point-of-care mass spectrometer test“. In this work, an on-site testing method was developed and evaluated for medical examination. For example, this method enabled to determine the concentration of an antibiotic and an opioid directly in blood, plasma, or urine in as little as 5 minutes.  Furthermore, traditional laboratory-based methods were developed. These included the diagnose of the rare MNGIE-disease and a 36-second test for the analysis of ecstasy tablets. To investigate potentially harmful drugs added to ecstasy tablets, a large panel of over 100 drugs was measured within a single analysis run on a miniaturised mass spectrometer. 

Congratulations to you both! We wish you all the best for the future!