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Medical Devices

The opioid epidemic is a serious health crisis in Canada, North America, and globally and has worsened during the COVID pandemic. Opioid treatment strategies are at the forefront of efforts to tackle this crisis. A collaborative team of clinicians at VGH and scientists at UBC have been working on innovative new technology to help address deficiencies in current treatment methods. One collaborative project has focused on a new, inexpensive, and portable detector that is capable of quantifying opioid concentrations in solutions. This device has a myriad of applications for front line clinicians, from safe injection sites to optimizing clinical opioid agonist titrations. The device is now at the pre-prototype stage and is capable of detecting fentanyl and its derivatives 10 to 100 times below their lethal dose. Another collaborative project has focused on the synthesis of opioid agonists that have longer in vivo lifetimes. Both projects have the potential to be transformative for the clinical setting.

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