Faculty partnership demonstrates the power of MLS and pharmacy collaboration

A MLS student in the lab / Photo by Darin Kamnetz. 

When the Medical Laboratory Sciences (MLS) program hired Dr. Jennifer Brown as assistant faculty in 2022, she combed through College of Pharmacy faculty looking for a partner in scholarly work. Her deep interest in drug small molecule analysis and cannabis research led her to Dr. Angela Birnbaum, professor in the Department of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology who has federally funded research in these areas. Now, they’re working on projects together— like medical cannabis research and different methods of home collection for drug concentration measurements— that exemplify how pharmacy and MLS complement each other. The pair naturally fit together, as Birnbaum has a MLS background in addition to her graduate training.

“All the things that we are doing are taking advantage of both worlds. With cannabis, we are improving the sensitivity in our assay so it can be used in additional pharmacokinetic studies,” Birnbaum said. “We are also working on home collection for multiple medications which leverages the expertise of both MLS and pharmacy-related research.”

Medical laboratory scientists excel in measurement and analytical quality, which is essential in order for clinicians to trust laboratory assay results when they’re treating patients. An assay measures the presence or concentration of a substance— for example, examining blood samples for different cannabinoids and metabolites. Though they’re trained for the clinical lab, taking that skill set and transferring it to research makes for a precise, organized, and reliable researcher, Brown said. 

“Having data be more accurate, reliable, and robust can improve any research,” Brown said. “I can see the advantage of having someone who's a medical laboratory scientist in every research lab as part of the quality control team.”

Within their cannabis research, misalignment of federal and state regulatory laws creates barriers to the research they wish to conduct, on top of difficulties they already face with cannabinoid compounds in general. 

“If you go to a store, there's so many cannabis products with all these claims— what's really in the container? Is it really what it says? We can't do that research to directly measure products because we can’t touch the products due to federal regulationary requirements,” Brown said. “There's a lot of challenges with measuring cannabis. It's very sticky, there's a lot of closely related compounds, and it's heat sensitive.”

Though for a while Minnesota’s cannabis program was more restrictive than others, more questions are surfacing as the state moves toward recreational use. Even with a top-shelf, quality product, researchers depend on an individual’s recollection of dosage, exposure, and timeline, which can be flawed. Directly measuring drug concentration in the blood is more reliable. While there are many kinds of cannabis research happening, Birnbaum said she and Brown are one of the few considering drug exposure as an objective measure in biological fluids like blood and urine. 

“Our assay will provide a tool for other investigators at the University to incorporate measurement of cannabinoids into their research projects, to measure drug exposure directly instead of counting on reported product content or doses,” Birnbaum said.

Their group effort with assay development has bigger implications as they work toward measurement of other therapeutic agents, including opioids, benzodiazepines, and antiseizure medications. They’re studying blood now, but they’re also planning to examine other fluids such as urine, saliva, and more. This opens their studies up to remote testing and more difficult to reach populations, making it easier for patients to be in studies. 

In addition to their cannabis projects, the two have also partnered to streamline quality control and efficiency in the lab research. Brown’s extensive experience with assay development has helped them to optimize instrumentation and introduce some of MLS’s newer efficiencies into the research world. 

“The computer programming we’ve incorporated into our research has allowed us to develop tools that can help with the daily functioning of  the lab, such as in the reporting of quality controls and criteria for accepting runs,” Birnbaum said. “Before Jennifer came, trying to get staff to graph the controls was such a challenge. Now, with this tool that one of our students has created, it will not be such a big deal— it will be more automated and they'll just do it.”

Birnbaum and Brown said these tools will impact their immediate research world by making data more reproducible and rigorous, all while not taking as long as it used to. They’ve now “perfected a system” that efficiently trains lab personnel in quality control and how to properly use instruments. An untrained researcher may ignore numbers from their instrument because they aren’t in range, make their curve look bad, or don’t match expectations. As a result of their system of training, their lab has mastered the art of troubleshooting.  

“For this collaboration, we are able to really make a robust assay and to train folks… We regularly talk about the theory, what's wrong with the instrument, and  isolate a variable in order to fix the issue,” Brown said. “We've helped develop some really good troubleshooters, and now they're really fast… That's a whole other skill set— when things are broken, where do you start?”

Their partnership exemplifies how pharmacy and medical lab science can make an incredibly effective duo. Everyone benefits— MLS capstone and undergraduate students hone their instrument skills and learn about all the possibilities within their career outside of the hospital. Pharmacy graduate students trained in their lab not only know how to measure drug concentrations and run instruments, but emerge knowing what questions to ask when issues arise and how to verify their numbers. 

“As a medical lab scientist, I know all about what goes wrong with testing. If a value doesn't make sense in a patient management situation from a pharmacist point of view, ask your medical laboratory scientist, because we might be the ones that can dig into it,” Brown said. “There are so many things that can go wrong and affect a result that a clinician doesn't need to know about, but the medical laboratory scientist does... There are many ways from a PharmD side where integrating MLS is going to be beneficial in the future.”