Developed, validated and implemented by Dr. Yuan Zhi in Mayo Clinic, a GC-MS based analytical method for screening / confirmation of barbiturates can simultaneously identify, confirm and quantitatively analyze nine barbiturates. This method performed well in the quality control program of Reference Labs, and won the research award of the 46th annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry (AACC) in 1994 and the Richard Marshall Education Award of the Chinese and western part of AACC. After that, Dr. Yuan Zhi took the lead in developing and improving the SPE method for penicillin antibiotics in the school of pharmacy, University of Minnesota, USA, greatly improving the sensitivity and reliability of the correlation analysis method based on liquid chromatography.

In addition, Dr. Yuan Zhi has been engaged in the development, validation and implementation of bioanalytical methods (mainly liquid chromatography, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and other technologies) in two well-known CRO companies PPD and tandem labs in the United States. In recent years, Dr. Yuan Zhi has further expanded his research field and entered the development and validation of macromolecular bioanalysis (LBA) method and immunogenicity (ADA) test method to support the development of macromolecular biological drugs.