Over the past few months, there have been a lot of news articles about drink spiking. Someone can put drugs in your drink unnoticeably, after which you may no longer be able to think clearly. Despite the increased number of reported cases of drugging, it can almost never be proven, and the extent of the problem is still unclear. As the iGEM team at TU Delft, we want to rapidly detect drugs in drinks in order to warn the user and provide evidence of the spiking.

One of the most commonly used rape drugs is 4-hydroxybutanoic acid, also known as GHB. However, few numbers are available on drugging with GHB, especially because this substance can disappear from the body within three hours. In addition, the sedative effects of GHB are very similar to those of alcohol, making it difficult to distinguish between alcohol poisoning and drugging based on symptoms alone. For these two reasons, evidence can almost never be provided of an incident involving drug use with GHB.

With our student team from TU Delft, we are working on a reliable, rapid sensor for GHB with our project, SPYKE. Our goal is to make a sensor that can for instance be placed in a cup. The moment GHB is added to the drink, a light in that cup turns on. This way, our sensor will protect the users against drugging, which can for instance lead to drug-facillitated sexual assault. We also want to be able to confirm the drugging with this sensor, so that victims have evidence which helps them to report the incident.

We are currently doing experiments in the laboratorium to see how we can develop this sensor in the best way possible. With this project we participate in the iGEM competition, an international competition in the field of synthetic biology, a field in which micro-organisms, DNA or proteins are improved and used for new applications. In this competition, more than 350 student teams from all over the world try to solve a local social problem using biotechnology.

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