Misuse of drugs both illicit and prescription medicines causes significant morbidity and mortality. Monitoring of trends in the drugs being used is important to inform public health policy and harm reduction. Recently, there have been important changes in the drugs available, with variation in the content / purity. Monitoring systems need to include an analytical component to confirm the actual drugs being used. Wastewater analysis is the gold standard used to assess recent population-level use of or exposure to illicit drugs, pharmaceuticals and other chemical substances, but fails to monitor long-term trends and often suffers from substance instability and degradation. We propose a complementary, ground-breaking approach to monitor longer-term use of drugs by analysing discarded hair collected from hairdressers and nails from beauty-salons using pooled samples to ensure anonymity. These data, combined with information from other available data on drug use, will improve the quality of information available to guide drug-related public policy and harm reduction.
A key step will be to develop and validate sensitive and selective laboratory techniques using the latest technologies (mass-spectrometry) with substance-free pooled hair and nails from volunteers. Importantly, sample preparation (washing, decontamination and separation of drugs of interest from impurities) and analysis via LC-MS will be optimised and standardised. To monitor the effect of environmental exposure to these substances, collected washes will be analysed alongside extracted samples to help distinguish drug use / intake from environmental contamination of the surface of the nails / hair.
There are three main objectives
1. The development and validation of robust and specific laboratory tests to detect and confirm selected drugs, pharmaceuticals and other substances in head hair and fingernails.(Years 1-2)
2. To use these tests to analyse hair and nail samples from sub-populations across London and from other parts of the UK. (Year 3)
3. To combine the information from this study with currently available data on drug use such as drug-use surveys, information on the content of drugs seized on the street, drug-related deaths, drug-related hospital admissions, and wastewater reports. (Year 4).
A 3-month rotation project would involve training the student on sensitive and sophisticated liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry equipment, sample preparation technologies, and awareness of the illicit drug market at the UK and European levels.
An important transferable outcome will be understanding the capability of sensitive and selective modern analytical instrumentation and how it may be applied to a biological system.
