Dive Brief:
- Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and German Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt) have launched a joint website where forensic chemists can share data on new drug variants.
- The goal of the website, called the NPS Data Hub, is to help forensic chemists more quickly identify new types of fentanyl and other narcotics driving an epidemic of drug overdoses. NPS stands for novel psychoactive substances.
- In addition to data on synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, the Data Hub is also intended to cover synthetic cannabinoids (synthetic marijuana), synthetic cathinones (bath salts), amphetamines and other dangerous drugs.
Dive Insight:
More than 42,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2016, more than any previous year on record, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. In 2017, the government declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency.
A recent analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that synthetic opioids such as illicitly manufactured fentanyl are driving the sharp rise in drug overdose deaths.
One reason law enforcement authorities are struggling to control the drug overdose epidemic is that clandestine chemists are constantly cooking up new forms of fentanyl, each with a slightly different chemical structure, NIST said. The NPS Data Hub will include the chemical structures of drug analogs and their chemical signatures, which act as keys to identifying them in the lab.
These underground chemists create new analogs to boost drug potency and to stay a step ahead of the law. Some fentanyl variants are thousands of times stronger than heroin, increasing the risk to users who may not know what they are consuming, according to NIST.
“If people start overdosing and dying from a new drug analog, authorities need to identify it as quickly as possible," Aaron Urbas, the NIST research chemist who led the project, said in a statement. “If you want to focus your resources effectively, you need to know what you’re looking for.”
The NPS Data Hub aims to shorten the time lag, which can be up to six months or more, between discovery of a new drug and distribution of the data needed to identify it. The site permits sharing of analytical data from any such identifying procedure, including Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Raman spectroscopy, and other less common tools for differentiating closely related compounds.
The chemists involved have rare expertise, according to NIST senior policy adviser Jayne Morrow.
“The Data Hub brings these experts together and provides a forum where they can discuss what they’re seeing in real time. There haven’t been great ways to do that before, and it’s really needed,” Morrow said in a statement.