Deborah French, PhD

Deborah French, PhD

Clinical Professor, Assistant Director of Chemistry and Director of Mass Spectrometry
Laboratory Medicine
Division
Chemistry
Specialty Areas
Clinical Toxicology
Mass spectrometry LC-MS/MS
Therapeutic Drug Monitoring
Steroid Hormones

UCSF
Laboratory Medicine, Box 0134
185 Berry Street, Suite 290
San Francisco, CA 94107
United States

Hospital Affiliations
UCSF Parnassus Heights
UCSF Mount Zion
UCSF Mission Bay
Research and Clinical Interests

My interests lie in the field of mass spectrometry and how we can utilize this technique to measure analytes in clinical samples. Currently we are running LC-MS/MS assays to measure total testosterone, estradiol, busulfan, ethyl glucuronide, voriconazole, posaconazole and isavuconazole for the patients at UCSF Medical Center. We are currently developing other small molecule assays and plan to work on protein assays in the future.

Selected Publications
  • French D. (2013) Development and validation of a serum total testosterone liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) assay calibrated to NIST SRM 971. Clinica Chimica Acta, 415:109-117.
  • French, D. (2016) Advances in bioanalytical techniques to measure steroid hormones in serum. Invited Review. Bioanalysis. 8(11):1203-1219.
  • Smith, A., Dowis, J., and French, D. (2018) Quantification of serum voriconazole, isavuconazole and posaconazole by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Invited submission. Current Protocols in Toxicology. e47.
  • Dowis, J., Woroniecki, W. and French, D. (2019) Development and validation of a LC-MS/MS assay for quantification of serum estradiol using calibrators with values assigned by the CDC reference measurement procedure. Clinica Chimica Acta. 492: 45-49.
  • Thomas, S.N., French, D., Jannetto, P.J., Rappold, B.A. and Clarke W.A. (2022) Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry for clinical diagnostics.  Nature Reviews Methods Primer 2, 96. 
  • Dowis, J., He, X., Pham, L. and French, D.  (2024)  A liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry assay for quantification of ethyl glucuronide and ethyl sulfate in urine.  Methods in Molecular Biology (Clinical Applications of Mass Spectrometry in Drug Analysis).  2737: 265-273.