Title: Advances in illicit drugs detection at points of care

Abstract

Introduction: Illicit drug analysis is widely applied in daily practice all over the world to overcome the rising crisis of drug addiction. Thus, the need for decentralization of the laboratory confirmatory methods to be portable and suits point of care (POC) settings has become a recent trend. Gas chromatography- mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is the traditional confirmatory gold standard for drug testing and is used for non-targeted substance screening, however, it uses large laboratory equipment, and it is limited to volatile non-polar compounds. Liquid chromatography- tandem MS (LC-tandem-MS) has become a new gold standard for its ability to identify more types of analytes (polar and non-polar), however, it is not suited for neither non-targeted drug screening nor for POC settings as it is not portable. Aim: Discuss the most advanced portable techniques for illicit drugs detection at point of care (POC) settings. Results: The emergence of miniature ambient ionization MS, that is portable and can analyze unprepared samples in native environment within one minute. Ion mobility spectrometer (IMS) is another advance that can identify compounds including isomers with high resolution within seconds and portable devices are available. Portable Raman and near infrared (NIR) spectrometers have allowed fast screening for drugs and have been efficiently used for other on-site forensic applications. Hence, these advanced techniques are promising for quick detection of illicit drugs in a POC setting. Conclusion: Miniature ambient ionization MS is very rapid with no sample preparation, but it is more expensive than other alternatives in POC testing. Thus, the best methods for POC drug testing are portable IMS, portable Raman spectrometer, and handheld NIR spectrometer for their accurate, easy, and quick analysis within seconds with affordable costs.