Grant: Project Grant

The North American overdose crisis remains at epidemic levels, with over 1M lives lost over the past decade. Currently, this crisis is driven by fentanyl and other unregulated ("street") drugs that have dramatically increased the risk of overdose mortality. Because the concentration and presence of these drugs is constantly shifting in unregulated drug markets, it is very difficult for people who use drugs to protect themselves. In response, drug checking services-which provide voluntary testing of unknown drug samples-have been implemented to reduce an individual's overdose risk. But existing drug checking technologies are limited by being extremely expensive and requiring technicians to operate them. This has, unfortunately, meant that most people who use drugs that could benefit from them do not have access. To be effective, drug checking services must use adaptive instruments that can be used without training, and which can identify current and future dangerous compounds in unknown drug samples. In response, we are developing DoseCheck, a handheld technology employing differential pulse voltammetry and machine learning classification to rapidly identify emerging drug threats, and to identify and communicate the presence of a range of psychoactive compounds driving overdose mortality. In this project, we will expand the range of compounds DoseCheck is able to detect and differentiate, improve its accuracy in doing so, and evaluate its capacity to quantify the concentration of fentanyl in unregulated ('street') drug samples.