For anyone who parties or goes out dancing, the risk of accidentally taking adulterated drugs is a real one. MabLab, presenting today on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, has created a testing strip that detects the five most common and dangerous additives in minutes.
Co-founders Vienna Sparks and Skye Lam met in high school, and during college the pair lost a friend to overdose. It’s a story that, sadly, many people (including myself) can identify with. Thankfully, testing strips are a common sight now at venues and health centers, with hundreds of millions shipping yearly.
If you haven’t seen them, the strips work like this: You dissolve a bit of the substance to be tested in a provided buffer solution, then dip the strip in. The liquid travels up the paper, reaching a treated area that changes color in the presence of an unwanted additive. They’re simple and effective, but limited in that they only detect one thing, most commonly fentanyl.
“We have an opportunity to replace that with a better version,” said Lam — one that detects five common lacing chemicals simultaneously: fentanyl, methamphetamine, benzodiazepine, xylazine, and methadone.
The company’s innovation is “a mix of physical and chemical,” said Sparks: “There’s a zone specifically designed for each agent, and we’re using novel treatments and materials on the strip to allow capillary action to occur without incurring cross-reactivity.”
That is to say, the different zones and chemical sensitivities won’t set each other off or prevent the others from activating.
If it all works as described, it would be an across-the-board improvement to what’s out there.
MabLab’s plan is to distribute its strips the same way everyone else has, and to leverage the manufacturing infrastructure that already exists. No need to reinvent the wheel, just do it better and give it a push. But they believe that this kind of testing is also a growth market, and not just due to an increase in laced drugs.
“We’re seeing a cultural change: people on campuses and at music festivals encouraging friends to test,” Sparks said. People are aware there’s a threat, and a way to be safer that isn’t abstinence — an approach that is, for drugs or other practices, seldom adopted by teens and college kids.
“It’s very similar to condom distribution,” said Lam; a proven way to mitigate risk is to give people the opportunity to do things safely and then get out of the way.
“University health systems, harm reduction centers, these places will buy strips in bulk. You walk in, grab a few, and walk out, no questions asked,” he continued. “These are organizations that will subsidize the cost; in New York City they spend $16 million just on test strips, and in California they’ve dedicated budget to it. A lot of this is coming from a 2022 act that gave billions to fund harm reduction tools.”
It’s not just young folks — quick, specific drug purity testing could be helpful at veteran’s centers, homeless shelters, needle exchanges, and for emergency services like EMTs. After all, if you’re responding to an overdose, as many departments do daily, it helps to be able to say with certainty what the patient is overdosing on. Sparks said they’re even in talks with Coachella and other music festivals.
“Looking toward the future, the biggest thing is getting those [letters of intent] that already have distribution channels in place,” said Sparks — like universities and clinics. As for actually making the strips, she credited the huge expansion of medical testing supply chains for the ability to produce them in bulk.
The startup has already begun hiring its team, and is focused on getting its first shipments out the door. If this supercharged new testing method hits the ground running, MabLab could corner the market while making people safer around the world.
