Toxtyper Screening: An New Kind of Forensic Evidence

Webinar Overview

The webinar will briefly introduce the field of forensic toxicology and focus on the use of the Toxtyper system for urine screening within this field. A special focus will be on urine sample preparation to improve time- and cost-effectiveness in the lab. Advantages and limitations of such a simplified sample preparation will be addressed and exemplified on selected authentic forensic cases.

Speaker

Dr. Andrea Steuer
Forensic Toxicologist Dept. of Forensic Pharmacology & Toxicology at Institute of Forensic Medicine, Zürich

Andrea Steuer studied pharmacy in Saarbruecken, Germany. After her degrees, she started her PhD thesis on “Phase II Metabolism of 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine: Synthesis, Analysis and Enantioselective in vitro and in vivo Kinetics” with Prof. Hans H. Maurer at the Department of Experimental and Clinical Toxicology of the University of Saarland in Homburg, Germany. After her PhD defence, Andrea Steuer moved to Zurich to work with Prof. Thomas Kraemer in the Department of Forensic Pharmacology and Toxicology of the Zurich Institute of Forensic Medicine. There she started as a Postdoc and worked on her habilitation that she submitted in the beginning of 2017. Additionally to her research, she contributed to service work doing expert reports for police and state attorneys and obtained approval as Forensic Toxicologist of the Society of Toxicological and Forensic Chemistry (GTFCh) and the Swiss Society of Forensic Medicine (SGRM). In 2015 she took over the position of deputy head of the department. Andrea Steuer is a member of The International Association of Forensic Toxicologists (TIAFT), the International Association of Therapeutic Drug Monitoring & Clinical Toxicology (IATDMCT), the GTFCh, and the SGRM.

Key Learnings

• How the Toxtyper helps to provide faster results in daily forensic screening
• How a simple unified sample preparation for urine simplifies the lab workflow
• Why is the identification of urine metabolites important for your screening results