Ion mobility spectrometry for detection of Cannabis sativa L. metabolites from exhaled breath

Smoking Cannabis and driving is an illegal offense and causes severe accidents including a high death rate world wide. As an attempt to increase safety on roads a mobile and rapid analytical device was developed for the detection of secondary natural compounds from Cannabis sativa after consumption in exhaled breath. Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is a fast and sensitive bioanalytical tool for the detection of volatile compounds in gas phases. IMS has been used in the past in food industry and civil safety areas for the detection of flavors and fragrancies or explosives, respectively. Beyond this recent research IMS has been studied for the detection of volatile natural product after consumption like psychoactive drugs. Cannabis sativa L. is a widely used drug that is inhaled and consumers administer besides of cannabinoids other secondary compounds like terpenoids as well. In a in vitro and in vivo study IMS was studied to explore limitations for the detection of C. sativa L. metabolites after smoking standardized dried flowers (Cannabis flos) to determine biomarkers from exhaled breath. Based on pharmacokinetic data consumption of Cannabis sativa can be traced back for 3 hours significantly and obtained data allow discrimination between oral use and legal use of hemp based food products. Second, this contribution will report on the development of algorithms and statistical methods based on bioinformatics for the development of a software to detect Cannabis related pattern and to operate a mobile, non invasive and fast analytical device.