Tox Chat Box: Decoding forensic toxicology with LC-MS/MS

Dr. Victor Vandell is the Science Director for Pain Management, special chemistry and toxicology at Quest Diagnostics, where he is working with the Corporate Research and Development group in the area of Toxicology at Quest to provide analytical support for their laboratory’s operations and joint laboratory harmonization initiatives.

Pierre Negri (P.N.): Welcome to the eighth episode of Tox Chat Box, a SCIEX vodcast series where we discuss the latest trends and applications in forensic toxicology.
I’m Pierre Negri from SCIEX. In today's episode, we're discussing the process of relocating a toxicology lab, which included a fleet of over 60 LC-MS instruments. To discuss this topic today, I'm joined by Dr. Victor Vandell.
Victor is the Science Director for Pain Management, Special Chemistry, and Toxicology at Quest Diagnostics. Hi, Victor, how are you?

Victor Vandell (V.V.): Hey, Pierre. How's it going?

P.N.: I'm great, thank you. First of all, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I remember running into you at a few conferences last year, and you were telling me that you were in the process of planning your lab relocation. I know you've been super busy over the past year planning and executing the big move.
To start things off, can you talk to us about some of the timelines of this relocation and maybe provide some details on the scale of the move?

V.V.: Well, essentially, our goal was to move a pretty substantial portion of our drug testing lab. We did some consolidation and thought about how we were going to take this relatively large West Coast lab and move it to another facility. I told you we were looking at moving 60-plus Triple Quad mass spectrometers, three big Olympus 5800 or Beckman 5800 immunoassay analyzers—these are the big boys—along with about 12 Hamilton workstations.
We had a lot of support equipment, ailed units. We even moved over a GC-MS setup for blood alcohol testing and just a lot of different things had to come over.
And that's not even to mention all of the lab gear and equipment—glassware, consumables, all of the stuff needed to support the testing equipment and instruments we use in our day-to-day drug testing. So we needed to come up with a plan to do this.
Initially, we had approximately four months to get it done.
Part of the challenge was not only the massive amount of equipment to move, but also the fact that the lab couldn’t stop functioning. In other words, the lab we were moving from was processing thousands of samples a day, and that process couldn’t be interrupted. It was almost like fueling a plane midair.
We had to find that magic moment where we could flick on the light at the new site and let everything run and result from the new lab, while then bringing over everything from the old lab.
We started planning about a year and a half out—inventorying everything. We had initial layouts, and the new lab had to be designed. We didn’t move into a prefab lab—we moved into an office building and turned it into a lab. There was a lot of construction, gutting, and rebuilding the whole facility before we could move in.

P.N.: Wow. It sounds like quite a substantial move. And like you mentioned, quite the balancing act. Putting all the moving parts together must have been quite the endeavor.
One of the requirements you just mentioned for the move was to maintain current laboratory production activities at the first site while moving and verifying instrument performance at the new site. I remember you mentioning using Gantt charts to plan and execute the relocation of the instruments.
How critical was it for you to use these charts, and can you describe how you leveraged this visual management platform?

V.V.: Yeah, the Gantt charts were invaluable—not only because they gave us a big-picture view of what needed to be done, but because everything had to be synchronized. Moving an instrument from spot A to B required coordination between all players.
The Gantt chart helped organize all these moving parts. We had a schedule set up showing when each instrument would go offline. All the instruments were listed out in massive Excel worksheets with Gantt charts.
We laid them out in an order that allowed us to keep running the major provider instruments for day-to-day operations, while moving the secondary and backup instruments first.
In the Gantt chart, we included timeframes for vendor inspections before the move, gave our scientists three days for pre-move verification, and scheduled decontamination and the actual move.
Once the instrument arrived at the new site, we allowed three to four days for vendors to spec the instrument back in. Then we gave our scientists another three days for post-move testing and verification.
The whole process took about two weeks per instrument.

P.N.: I want to go back to one of the things you mentioned—from an analytical verification standpoint. Can you talk about the method performance verification process and the boxes that had to be checked before you could use the instruments in live production? You mentioned carryover, accuracy, precision—can you elaborate?

V.V.: Sure. When you're doing a move like this, you have to think about what needs to be tested to demonstrate that nothing has changed in the instrument’s performance or the method’s performance on that instrument.
We needed to show that we’d get the same answer at location A and location B with the same instrument.
We do a lot of validation and verification of assays here.
Core tests include carryover—making sure the instrument is clean and doesn’t have residual analytes from previous tests. Precision—running a series of replicates over several days. Linearity—demonstrating that the assay is linear across the expected range.
We ran all these tests pre-move, then froze the plates at –20 °C. We did extensive testing to verify analyte stability at that temperature—some analytes were stable for up to six months.
We started testing this well before the move. Once the instrument was relocated, we reran the same assays and correlated the data to confirm consistent performance. That’s how we verified that the instrument was back to spec.

P.N.: Great. Thank you for walking us through the process. It was very meticulous and well planned. Congrats to you and your team.
Now that the dust has settled and you're in full production, looking back—can you pick one thing that worked really well and one thing that didn’t go as planned? I know you mentioned construction delays.

V.V.: Let me start with the good stuff. There was a lot of great execution. Our planning was impeccable, even with the obstacles. We adjusted dates on our Gantt charts, and everyone stayed aligned.
Our scientists, project planners, vendors, movers—everyone was on point and executed when needed.
I have to give kudos to our scientific team, production, and R&D at Quest. They were in the trenches with the instruments, running the tests.
Watching the team execute was the best part.
Now, the bad side—construction delays. At one point, we started to move, and inspectors halted progress. They wanted to re-inspect, which caused delays and jammed our schedule.
We had to stand down multiple times. Eventually, we became numb to it. It was frustrating, but we adapted.

P.N.: Great. Well, thank you so much for this comprehensive and thorough retrospective. That was quite the project. Congratulations to you and your team on a successful move.

V.V.: Thank you, Pierre. We got it done—check it off the list. It’s a relief to be on the other side.

P.N.: Thank you so much for your insights and for sharing your experience. I really appreciate it.
That’s a wrap for this episode on relocating a fleet of instruments to a new lab space.
Thanks again to Victor for taking the time to share his experience.
In the next episode, we’ll be joined by Justin Polis, Manager of the Pharmacology and Toxicology Mass Spec Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University.
He’ll talk about using mass spectrometry to track the evolution of designer drugs in both legal and illegal drug markets.
Make sure to tune in for that. Thank you so much, and we’ll see you next time.