Field Drug Identification Kit

Illicit drug trafficking has increasingly been used to fund terrorist groups since the end of the Cold War. As illicit drugs increasingly finance terrorism, soldiers in the U.S. Army are increasingly playing an active role in identifying these drugs in difficult and demanding environments. Unfortunately, these devices have many shortcomings, such as being too expensive, bulky and heavy, being non-ruggedized, requiring a high level of training, only being able to detect a single drug and being prone to false-positives. In this project, SensoDx is developing its Programmable Bio-Nano-Chip (p-BNC) technology that will permit detection of illicit drugs in the field. During Phase II, SensoDx plans to: a) expand the classes of drugs that it targets from three to five, by the addition of drugs representative of a Cathinine and a hallucinogen; and b) increase the panel size for the detectable drugs from three to eight drugs.The ultimate goal is to detect all eight drugs in a single test that takes less than 5 minutes.