Grant: Alliance Grants

This project aims at enhancing the current performance of a commercial instrument designed for the detection of street drugs in the context of the dramatic Opioid crisis that has a major impact on the Canadian population and its stakeholders with a number of overdoses exceeding 7500 death per annum. Specifically this project aims at enhancing the limit of detection of drugs present in multicomponent mixtures with an improved limit of detection. Fentanyl analogues will be primarily targeted because they are the most potent drugs responsible of most lethal overdoses. Due to its low cost, Fentanyl is often present in street drugs even if the consumers do not know that it is present. It is often mixed with fillers and other psychotropic substances such as cocaine or heroin greatly increasing its effect and making it extremely dangerous. Because not everyone react the same to Fentanyl, knowing its presence and concentration in a multicomponent mixture is very important. The plan of work described above includes three directions that will help enhancing the performance of an instrument originally designed by a Canadian company to fight the opioid crisis. Such advances enabled by this grant application will provide significant improvements of the SCATR instrument with performance that will surpass its competitors in terms of drug analysis and detection limit when combined with surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) technology and when operated in tandem with other techniques such as mass spectrometry and infrared spectroscopy. The advances generated by this project will, beyond the completion of this project, will save more Canadian lives by providing to the people who use drugs, information about their drugs, that would lead to a change in their habits.