Fast Lab Test Uses Microwave Plasma to Spot Drug Weaknesses

The safety of medicines can be hurt by light and heat, so scientists must test how drugs stand up to these forces. Traditional tools like HPLC, DSC and GC‑MS take time, need extra steps, and often look at light damage and heat damage separately. A new approach called microwave plasma torch mass spectrometry, or MPT‑MS, changes that by checking both kinds of stress at once and without any sample prep.MPT‑MS works by blasting a tiny amount of the drug—just a few milligrams—directly into a plasma torch. The hot gas ionises the material, and the mass spectrometer reads what fragments appear. In experiments with six common medicines—chlorpheniramine, ornidazole, metronidazole, tinidazole, acetaminophen and theophylline—the whole analysis took about two minutes per tablet. The order in which the drugs broke down matched earlier studies that measured only heat decomposition, proving the new method is reliable. Moreover, MPT‑MS revealed distinct patterns when light and heat were combined. For example, drugs containing a nitroimidazole group produced a special ion called