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Smart chemistry to combat B.C.’s toxic drug supply

UBC chemists are re-envisioning existing techniques and technology to make drug checking and entering treatment quicker and easier. Since the province declared the toxic drug epidemic a public health emergency in 2016, more than 21,000 people have lost their lives to overdoses across B.C. - a trend that has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic. Work to combat the drug crisis has traditionally focused on pharmacology, medicine, psychiatric services, and legal policy. But that approach is broadening as researchers start looking at frontline technology available to clinicians. Get the full story at https://bit.ly/ai-cancer-care

ubcscience

9 months ago
the best approach to solving the opioid crisis is to use all the expertise and play cqbc UBC has some amazing resources some really good researchers and if we can focus that efforts on the opioid crisis we can develop new technology and new tools to help address it seven years ago the province declared the toxic drug crisis a public health emergency since then over 11 000 British Columbians have lost their lives to illicit toxic drugs making it the leading cause of unnatural death in our provinc
e have the ability to help people you should just do it Sarah Guzman and Dr Samus are just two of the many researchers at UBC putting their science to work to address the crisis Sarah in the hind lab are using hplc high performance liquid chromatography to develop more accurate ways of testing drugs we're trying to implement a free low barrier drug checking service for people on campus having access to fast accurate drug tracking Services helps people make informed decisions about their drug use
and can be life-saving we're trying to use our big hblc to translate a method into the portable hplc so that it can be used at point of care we're hoping to take it to overdose prevention sites and festivals and test it there let's say you have a chocolate cookie and you want to look at how much chocolate there is how much flour there is how much sugar you put it through the hblc and you get all those components separated so it's perfect for drugs because when you have a drug sample it's mixed
with very different stuff you have a mix of fentanyl a mix of sugar a mix of caffeine and when you analyze them you're able to separate each component and look at them individually Matt our engineer at the lab he's developing this robot to simplify and standardize sample prep everything will be free so if you want parts that we 3D printed they'll be available just downloaded 3D print build this robot yourself we want this to be accessible not just in BC but we want this hopefully everywhere my h
ope is that all the Technologies and all the expertise at UBC can all come together to address the current crisis

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