High-throughput prediction of AKB48 in emerging illicit products by NIR spectroscopy and chemometrics

The market of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) is spreading as emerging problem in forensic toxicology. As a consequence, new screening tools are more and more required for the early detection of illicit drugs in counterfeit products. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) followed by chemometrics demonstrated to be a useful tool for the multiparametric characterization of complex matrices. In this work, the integration of NIR spectroscopy with chemometrics was investigated in cooperation with the Italian Scientific Investigation Department (Carabinieri RIS) of Rome for the determination of AKB48 (N-1-Adamantyl-1-pentyl-1H-indazole-3-carboxamide), a new synthetic cannabinoid recently appeared as illicit drug. The application of the NIR spectroscopy analysis followed by chemometrics shows that it is possible to determine the presence of the AKB48 in real complex matrices by the mean of multivariate statistical analysis. Two models of prediction were optimized and validated for ABK48 determination based on Partial Least Square and Principal Component Regression. Results on real samples confirm that NIR spectroscopy is a fast, cost-effective and useful tool for the high-throughput prediction of AKB48 as new psychoactive substances in illicit products.