Synthesis of a hapten capable of creating a lateral flow assay for recreational drugs of abuse

Dstl is seeking Expressions of Interest (EOI) responses from suppliers that currently have hapten generation capabilities, and whether they currently have or would be willing to obtain a Home office Drugs Licence to support this work. Dstl can provide information regarding the likely hapten(s) to synthesise in any future competitive tender. Within the EOI response, it would be beneficial for the potential supplier to provide indicative lead times and indicative costs to 1) synthesise a single hapten and to 2) synthesis two haptens that are entirely different to one another but there may be synergies and resultant cost savings by developing two at the same time. Please email a PDF document maximum 3 pages to hlander@dstl.gov.uk explaining current capability and detailing indicative costs/ timelines.

Additional information: We require two haptens that can detect opiates and cannabinoids, in that priority order. The opiates will be structurally similar to 2-benzyl benzimidazole based opiates and the cannabinoids will be structural similar to JWH-01. Both haptens will need to be able to detect a powder (or a pill) and potentially material on impregnated paper. The haptens will be deliberately designed to be structurally unspecific to any single molecule, but specific to a range of compounds with similar structures. Sampling processing time would be ideally less than 5 minutes long, but the shorter the better. Finally, the reading mechanism can be simply a control line and a test line (or absence thereof).