2024 PAUL COVERDELL COMPETITIVE GRANT

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) Forensic Laboratory provides forensic science services across Kansas. One of its accredited services is providing forensic toxicology testing to 104 of the 105 counties in Kansas, supporting police departments, sheriff's offices, coroners, and KBI investigations. Traditional drugs-of-abuse continue to prevail across the state, but novel psychoactive substances (NPS) and opioids are becoming increasingly routine in impaired driving, death investigation, and violent crime casework. Forensic toxicology services have been limited in underserved rural communities for unattended deaths. The KBI has recently implemented an education and outreach program to support testing for these cases to provide more accurate overdose data for the state.

The primary goals of this project are the following: provide dynamic toxicology testing services for Kansas law enforcement and public health agencies that monitor for continuously evolving NPS entering the Midwest to include potent opioids; and maintain the highest caliber of forensic toxicology testing across all matrices for Kansas citizens.

The KBI Forensic Laboratory proposes the acquisition of an alternate liquid-chromatograph time-of-flight mass spectrometer (LC-QTof-MS) for the forensic toxicology section to increase sensitivity and specificity for potent NPS and opioids in all matrices. The forensic toxicology acquisition of a LC-QTof-MS will strengthen the quality of testing, decrease turnaround times, and decrease evidence backlogs. The forensic toxicology section currently has a 10-year-old LC-QTof-MS with proven success for blood drug testing but the instrument is at capacity with current caseload. An alternate LC-QTof-MS will be validated for new matrices and additional methods that will replace less specific and sensitive screening methods. In addition, this alternate LC-QTof-MS will maintain quality of testing by providing redundancy for the laboratory's 10-year-old LC-QTof-MS should it become out-of-service. A new streamlined, testing approach will be validated and implemented with the acquired LC-QTof-MS. This significantly improved testing approach for all matrices with an evolving scope of testing that includes NPS and opioids provides law enforcement, judicial systems, and public health partners with the information they need to offer more meaningful interventions and countermeasures to improve highway safety, decrease recidivism, and reduce overdose deaths making Kansas safer.