Opioid crisis refers to the misuse and addiction to opioids including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. According to the report from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, every day, more than 90 Americans die after overdosing on opioids. Now this is a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social and economic welfare, and points to the importance of drug screening. To address this need, researchers at McMaster University have developed a new drug screening tool that could lead to the rapid and accurate identification of fentanyl, as well as a vast number of other drugs of abuse. Its high throughput platform based on mass spectrometric method offers a rapid yet accurate method for simultaneous detection and identification of drugs of abuse (DoA) at their recommended screening cutoff levels in human urine. This test method also allows systematic surveillance, specimen verification, and retrospective testing of designer drugs, avoiding conventional drug tests.
Healthcare settings now rely on traditional urine tests and immunoassays for primary screening of drugs of abuse. However, these conventional tests are reported to be inadequate for detecting the alarming variety of drugs, which include synthetic opioids, tranquilizers, stimulants and anti-anxiety agents. According to the lead author of the study, "Current technologies are not specific, accurate nor comprehensive enough, which impairs a physician's ability to properly care for patients, such as monitoring for drug compliance, potential substitution or polydrug usage."
Limitations of the current testing method may impact patient safety when monitoring for medication compliance, drug substitution, or misuse/abuse and also require follow-up confirmatory testing with more specific methods.
Discussed in the current edition of the journal Analytical Chemistry, the new mass spectrometric method addresses a serious public health emergency related to opioid addiction and unintentional overdose deaths.
The new method would eliminate a two-stage process currently in use for drug monitoring by allowing technicians to run many tests at once in a high throughput manner. This method can
- screen for a wider range of drugs of abuse
- identify designer drugs that elude conventional tests
- dramatically cut processing time, and
- improve screening accuracy with quality assurance
The research team plans to conduct validation testing in collaboration with a clinical laboratory in Mississauga to ensure that the new method can identify drugs that aren't screened currently. To meet the rising drugs of abuse concern, leading lab equipment dealers are also supplying quality drug test cups that can provide faster test results in just minutes.