A new drug test can detect four classes of drugs in traces of sweat found in a fingerprint, from both the living and deceased.
The Intelligent Fingerprinting Drug Screening System enables the detection of amphetamines, cannabis, cocaine and opiates from a single sample in just ten minutes. It also showed accurate by UK coroners to detect drugs in the sweat of fingerprint samples gathered from deceased individuals.
Intelligent Fingerprinting is a spin-out company from the University of Easy Anglia. Because its Drug Screening System works by analyzing the sweat from a fingerprint it is non-invasive and non-biohazardous and does not require the collection of saliva or urine samples. it is currently being tested in drug rehabilitation centers and workplaces and studies are underway for use in airport screening and for applications within prisons and probation services.
“We matched the coroners’ drug test results obtained using our fingerprint drug screen with a second sample tested in laboratory conditions, achieving excellent correlation in terms of accuracy,” said University of East Anglia Emeritus Prof David Russell, from co-author of the new paper and Intelligent Fingerprinting’s Founder and Chief Scientific Officer.
Citation: Mark Hudson, Tanya Stuchinskaya, Smita Ramma, Jalpa Patel, Claudia Sievers, Stephan Goetz, Selina Hines, Eleanor Menzies, David A Russell; Drug screening using the sweat of a fingerprint: lateral flow detection of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol, cocaine, opiates and amphetamine, Journal of Analytical Toxicology, , bky068, https://doi.org/10.1093/jat/bky068
