Minet Emmanuel, Errington Graham, Scherer Gerhard, Newland Kirk, Sharifi Mehran, Bailey Brian, McEwan Mike, Cheung Francis
British American Tobacco, Group Research and Development, Regents Park Road, Southampton, SO15 8TL, UK.
BMC Res Notes. 2011 Oct 10;4:391. doi: 10.1186/1756-0500-4-391.
Biomarkers have been used extensively in clinical studies to assess toxicant exposure in smokers and non-smokers and have recently been used in the evaluation of novel tobacco products. The urinary metabolite 3-HPMA, a metabolite of the major tobacco smoke toxicity contributor acrolein, is one example of a biomarker used to measure exposure to tobacco smoke. A number of laboratories have developed liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) based methods to measure urinary 3-HPMA; however, it is unclear to what extent the data obtained by these different laboratories are comparable.
This report describes an inter-laboratory comparison carried out to evaluate the comparability of 3-HPMA measurement between four laboratories. A common set of spiked and authentic smoker and non-smoker urine samples were used. Each laboratory used their in-house LC-MS/MS method and a common internal standard. A comparison of the repeatability ('r'), reproducibility ('R'), and coefficient of variation for 3-HPMA demonstrated that within-laboratory variation was consistently lower than between-laboratory variation. The average inter-laboratory coefficient of variation was 7% for fortified urine samples and 16.2% for authentic urine samples. Together, this represents an inter-laboratory variation of 12.2%.
The results from this first inter-laboratory comparison for the measurement of 3-HPMA in urine demonstrate a reasonably good consensus between laboratories. However, some consistent measurement biases were still observed between laboratories, suggesting that additional work may be required to further reduce the inter-laboratory coefficient of variation.
生物标志物已广泛应用于临床研究，以评估吸烟者和非吸烟者接触有毒物质的情况，最近还被用于新型烟草产品的评估。尿代谢物3 - HPMA是主要烟草烟雾毒性成分丙烯醛的一种代谢物，是用于测量接触烟草烟雾的生物标志物的一个例子。许多实验室已经开发了基于液相色谱 - 串联质谱（LC - MS/MS）的方法来测量尿中的3 - HPMA；然而，尚不清楚这些不同实验室获得的数据在多大程度上具有可比性。
本报告描述了一项实验室间比较，以评估四个实验室之间3 - HPMA测量的可比性。使用了一组常见的加标以及真实的吸烟者和非吸烟者尿液样本。每个实验室使用其内部的LC - MS/MS方法和一种通用内标。对3 - HPMA的重复性（'r'）、再现性（'R'）和变异系数的比较表明，实验室内变异始终低于实验室间变异。强化尿液样本的平均实验室间变异系数为7%，真实尿液样本为16.2%。总体而言，这代表了12.2%的实验室间变异。
这项首次针对尿中3 - HPMA测量的实验室间比较结果表明，各实验室之间达成了相当不错的共识。然而，实验室之间仍观察到一些一致的测量偏差，这表明可能需要进一步开展工作以进一步降低实验室间变异系数。
