Benchtop system to quantify fentanyl in fluid.

Context: In the 4th and 5th years of the Engineering Physics program at UBC, teams of four students undertake industry-sponsored projects designed to provide hands-on experience tackling ambitious real-world problems.

One such problem is the opioid epidemic, which claims thousands of lives in British Columbia each year due to fentanyl overdoses. Fentanyl is highly addictive, and many individuals will use a drug sample even when they know it contains fentanyl. Therefore, it's crucial to provide a quantitative measure of the amount of fentanyl present in a drug sample. While many inexpensive solutions can detect the presence of fentanyl, few can quantify its concentration.

Our project focused on enhancing a novel electrochemical technique developed by Dr. Dan Bizzotto and Dr. Glen Sammis from the UBC Chemistry Department. Their method, although capable of inexpensively quantifying fentanyl concentration, required 8 hours to analyze a single sample and involved a complex laboratory process. Our goal was to reduce the analysis time to 20 minutes and make the process accessible to non-specialists, thereby improving the efficiency of fentanyl detection.

To achieve this, my team and I designed and built a benchtop prototype. We developed a fluidic system to handle drug samples, passing them through a custom 3D-printed microfluidic flowcell containing an electrode. We then interfaced a potentiostat through serial communication to effect a series of redox reactions to detect fentanyl concentration. Additionally, we created a multithreaded desktop application in Python to control the system, manage data, and analyze results.

The outcome was a benchtop device that significantly expedited the detection process, allowing Dr. Bizzotto and Dr. Sammis to further refine their detection chemistry. For a detailed technical overview of our work, please refer to our final report below.