Detecting Opioids in Recreational Drugs With Yeast

This year’s Northern BC iGEM team has identified the opioid overdose crisis as a problem with local significance that we will address from a harm reduction perspective. Many opioid-related overdoses affect casual drug users who have consumed non-opioid ‘party’ drugs, such as MDMA (Ecstasy) or Cocaine, that have been contaminated with Fentanyl or one of its analogues without the user’s knowledge. While Fentanyl test strips do exist, thus far, none are reliable, sensitive, or accurate enough to gain widespread use in North America. With a growing number of highly potent Fentanyl analogues, such as Carfentanil, it is critical to develop a more general test for the presence of any opioid in what is assumed to be a non-opioid drug sample.

The Northern BC iGEM team intends to build a user-friendly, highly sensitive, accurate, and inexpensive opioid biosensor in yeast that can be used to test non-opioid drug samples for opioid contamination prior to drug consumption. The system exploits biological processes in yeast that will amplify the signal generated in the presence of opioid, thereby allowing for visual detection of even trace levels of opioid contamination. Our hope is that access to a reliable pre-consumption opioid test will allow those who choose to use non-opioid drugs recreationally to do so more safely, reducing the number of opioid-related overdoses across the province.

The project will be competed at the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, hosted by the iGEM Foundation, in October. This is an annual event that challenges more than 300 teams from 45 different countries to identify a problem of local significance and to attempt to address that problem using approaches based in synthetic biology. 

In order to bring forth a competitive project this year and in the years to come, the Northern BC iGEM team is asking for your help to outfit our lab with the standard molecular biology equipment and supplies required to complete our projects, and to help send our competitors to the competition this fall.

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If you have any questions please contact us at [email redacted]