26th March 2008

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Professor Franklin Smyth

Pioneering research by scientists at the University of Ulster and the University of Castilla-La Mancha at Cuidad Real, Spain could lead to an important breakthrough in helping to identify people at risk from suicide and self-harm.

Franklin Smyth, Professor of Bioanalytical Chemistry at Ulster’s Biomedical Research Institute, is co-supervising the research and explains that a chemical analysis of a hair sample can help shed light on an individual’s history of drug use and abuse.

“If drugs have been taken, even going back a period of up to six months, it is still possible to detect them by analysis of the hair sample using our state-of-the-art liquid chromatography -mass spectrometry instrumentation at Ulster. Drugs are chemically more stable in such hair matrices compared to either blood or urine,” says Professor Smyth.

Professor Smyth says that now that they have developed the appropriate analytical technology, the next stage will be to conduct controlled field trials and the findings could help identify people at risk from suicide or self-harm.  

Dr Virginia Rodríguez Robledo - whose research expertise is in topical analytical methods for the identification and determination of antidepressants drugs in pharmaceutical formulations and biological samples such as urine, plasma or serum - was awarded a regional fellowship from ‘Consejería de Educación y Ciencia de la Junta de Comunidades de Castilla La Mancha, the government department responsible for education and science, to carry out collaborative research in analytical chemistry at a UK university.  

She opted to study under the supervision of Professor Smyth, for the academic years 2006-2008, on a research project involving a study of the analytical behaviour of selected drugs using liquid chromatography, electrospray ionisation ion trap mass spectrometry, gas chromatography and polarography.  

According to Professor Smyth, the collaboration between Ulster and University of Castilla-La Mancha has proved very successful with a review and one original paper published in prestigious journals. Furthermore, he says the research findings on drug analysis in biomatrices is of relevance to the wider area of research in Ulster which is the prevention of suicide and self harm.

In particular, Professor Smyth, Dr Stephen McClean, Dr Bernadette Doherty from Ulster’s School of Biomedical Sciences and Professor Julian Leslie, from the School of Psychology, have been involved in the validation of the use of hair and saliva sampling in the detection of antidepressant and other drug use for application to young people and the investigation of the long-suspected link between antidepressant and other drug use and suicide by such persons.  

External funding for this research to date has come from the Flax Trust with additional internal funding from the University of Ulster.

For further information, please contact:

Trina Porter
Telephone: 028 71675511
Email: Trina Porter