Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.
Rapid, Reliable, and Risk-Free Detection of Fentanyl
Canada is in the midst of an opioid crisis: potent drugs like Fentanyl have been responsible for over 42,000 overdoses across the country each year. Canadians are consuming street drugs underhandedly cut with cheap and deadly fillers designed to increase their potency. To combat the increasing number of misrepresented narcotics, drug analysis can be performed at safe consumption sites, alerting users of the presence of dangerous fillers and verifying the chemical composition of each substance before consumption. My research is focused on creating an analytical technique that offers rapid, reliable, and risk-free methods for drug investigation, implementing Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) to detect trace amounts of Fentanyl in street drugs. I have designed a highly sensitive SERS method that is calibrated to reveal the molecular fingerprint of Fentanyl in under 5 minutes using arrays of raspberry-shaped gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) on a glass coverslip as the drug loading platform.
Paige McGarry
MSc candidate, Chemistry
Faculty of Science - Western University
Supervisor Francois Lagugne-Labarthet
Paige (she/her) is a first-year MSc student studying Physical and Analytical chemistry in Francois Lagugne-Labarthet's group. Her MSc research is focused on synthesizing gold nano-raspberries and using nanoimprint lithography to quantify low concentrations of Fentanyl analogues by a technique called surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). This technique unlocks the molecular fingerprint and can detect fentanyl laced in street drugs at low concentrations. An advantage of SERS is that it can be performed on-site at safe consumption sites for rapid analysis of street drugs to alarm drug users of the exact composition of their substance. She hopes to assist in reducing opioid related drug overdoses through her research and to spread awareness on the resources available for drug users.
You can connect with Paige on LinkedIn or via email pmcgarr4@uwo.ca.
View Paige's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/668/.