Facilitating detection of new psychoactive substances (NPS) in wastewater

New psychoactive substances (NPS) are a group of non-regulated chemicals by international drug policy and regulations. They have proliferated around the world, leading to public health concerns. Several sampling techniques and analytical methods are necessary to report occurrences and suppress undesirable outbreaks to cope with the dynamic NPS drug market. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has demonstrated the advantage of near real-time spatial-temporal investigation. It follows the principle that urine and stool from the wastewater treatment plant catchment end up in the municipal sewage system as parent compounds or metabolites after drug ingestion. A wastewater analysis CORe group Europe (SCORE) was established in 2010 to study other illicit drug consumption between major cities, concurrently evaluating the analytical procedures for wastewater analysis. Since then, new platforms and improved workflows have been established as critical tools for tracking illicit drug consumption in the community to monitor drug use and understand the population's lifestyle habits. Over the years, WBE drug monitoring has been incorporated routinely as a vital tool to reinforce the national healthcare system, security for addiction and self-harm, and crime monitoring. This project aims to provide a comprehensive insight into method development focusing on instrumentation detection for multiclass NPS compounds, explore the stability of NPS under various conditions, and understand how policy changes influence the occurrence of NPS in different regions.

Please note this is a Student Progress Review Presentation by Dhaya Nadarajan.