MALDI-MS imaging for direct drug distribution analysis.

MALDI Imaging has gained huge interest in the past few years with an ever increasing population of specialists choosing to investigate samples using MALDI imaging, including growing interest and financial backing from pharma and contract research organisations.Presented within this thesis is the development and application of MALDI imaging techniques for a variety of analytical problems. The use of various software packages have been employed in the interpretation of the data acquired from MALDI experiments including, the use of statistical analysis for the identification of ion of interest from 6 distinct brain regions and also for the identification of ions of interest associated with small molecule tumour markers.The advantages of MALDI-IMS-MSI as a further separation stage within MALDI-MSI have been shown. Demonstrated is a method for MALDI-IMS-MS imaging of endogenous lipids in healthy tissue and tumours, also demonstrated is the application of MALDI-IMS-MS to xenobiotic distribution studies, it has been clearly shown that ion mobility separation within MALDI-MSI experiments can improve the analysis of xenobiotics by removing any interfering ions.With instrumentation development for MALDI a high repetition rate Nd:YVO4 laser has been assessed as a possible method for decreasing acquisition time.