Nanalysis Scientific Corp. announced that its subsidiary Nanalysis Corp. is receiving advisory services and up to $1.45 million in non-repayable, non-dilutive funding from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP), to develop Artificial Intelligence based software tools to detect illicit substances on top of the company's portable Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometers.

In the global fight against substance abuse, federal, state, provincial, county and municipal governments around the world are tasked with characterizing increasing volumes of seized contraband. This characterization requires an array of different analytical techniques and is carried out by skilled forensic scientists in thousands of laboratories worldwide. In many cases these laboratories face significant sample backlog due to volume and may have difficulties in identifying new designer drugs.

This project, scheduled for three years, will focus on using quantum mechanical modelling and AI tools to perform analysis of magnetic resonance results generated by Nanalysis benchtop instruments. These tools will not only identify known illicit drugs but will also identify unknown drugs that are derivatives of known illicit substances also referred to as designer drugs or new psychoactive substances (NPS). The non-destructive nature of NMR spectroscopy and the fact that unlike traditional forensic testing methods, it is non-targeted, uniquely positions it to help identify these drugs.

The company is developing this application in the context of its quantitative NMR platform technology, which has other applications as well, beyond illicit drug detection.