Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta calls himself a pharmaco-epidemiologist. He’s also a harm reduction advocate, scientist, mentor, scientific advisor, community outreach specialist, and, most recently, MacArthur Fellow1. Dasgupta’s work centers around addressing the opioid epidemic at the community level. On one front, he is co-founder and Board Chair for the non-profit Remedy Alliance/For The People. This organization ensures that local harm reduction organizations have sustainable and equitable access to low-cost naloxone, which can be administered to directly counter the effects of an opiate overdose. They negotiate with pharmaceutical companies on behalf of nearly 500 community-based organizations, provide support to harm reduction programs around the country that want to establish or scale naloxone programs, and contribute to research to disseminate information worldwide (his paper describing the long-term impact of one community’s naloxone distribution and administration through an overdose prevention program2 was published just weeks after the MacArthur Foundation award was announced).
On another front is his own academic lab here at UNC Chapel Hill where he is a Gillings Innovation Fellow in the Gillings School of Global Public Health and a Senior Scientist at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center. Here, Dasgupta’s group, the Opioid Research Lab (as part of a multi-institution collaboration), or the Street Drug Analysis Lab colloquially, provides high-quality analytical testing of street drug samples submitted by drug users through community organizations (a practice called drug checking). By their nature, street drugs are not regulated, meaning drug users don’t know what is in them. Drug checking detects and identifies all the substances found within the samples, including dangerous contaminants. The results provide information back to local community groups (including EMS and clinical/hospital staff, harm reduction groups, and state and local health departments) who can prepare for and communicate the side effects of those contaminants in local drug supplies back to users, ensuring appropriate response and preparation for overdose events. The lab also provides results back to the individuals who donated the samples–empowering users to make informed decisions about their health. Anonymized data is then made publicly available in formats accessible by both the public and other data scientists.
Dasgupta sat down with me recently to discuss the impact and importance of shared resources at academic institutions to improving equity and access to the kind of instrumentation he uses for this research—and how one core facility in particular is a linchpin to the success of his program.
The Research Question
First things first: Dasgupta is not an analytical chemist. “I failed organic chemistry in college!” he laughed. “But a community outreach group we work with in Greenville had just gotten an FTIR [spectrometer] and asked me to help them figure it out.” Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometry shines infrared light through a drug sample and measures how the sample absorbs or transmits that light to identify the chemical composition of the substance. These instruments are relatively affordable, making this a cost-effective approach for local organizations and harm reduction groups to allow local drug users to test their own supply to look for contamination, like fentanyl, ketamine, and, most recently, xylazine. But this technique has its limitations, particularly for samples of different consistencies or that have specific kinds of molecules in them. “The Greenville organization ran into a sample they weren’t getting good data for with the FTIR,” Dasgupta explains. He knew there was technology that would overcome the problem, but it required a much more expensive instrument and specialized technique called Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS). This process physically separates the compounds to identify them and can separate derivatives of chemical compounds as well as detect trace quantities—all areas where FTIR struggles. The instruments to perform this kind of analysis are not cost-effective or practical for small community groups to operate in the field but are common at academic institutions conducting basic scientific research. “I literally did a Google search for ‘UNC FTIR and GC-MS’ and the [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] Chemistry Department’s Mass Spec Core came up” Dasgupta says.
Dr. Brandie Ehrmann, Director of the Chemistry Mass Spectrometry Core, remembers that e-mail. “He was like, ‘Hey, I’m interested in doing some mass spec on some illicit drugs’” she laughs. The core facility was successfully able to analyze the sample and provide the data back to the organization in Greenville, but the collaboration continued to grow. Since then, nearly 17,000 unique drug samples have been analyzed here at UNC as of October 2025 at a rate of nearly 400 a week. Dasgupta deliberately collects as little data as possible from the donors. He views his role as breaking down the barriers between the technology and the people who would benefit from the data output—namely, local organizations and the drug users themselves. This kind of drug checking program has been proven to cause users to change their substance use behavior when they know there is an increased risk of an overdose because of specific contamination3,4. And the organizations he partners with and the substance users themselves often drive all the research questions. “They ask more interesting, meaningful, and overall better questions.” He explains. “It’s their lived experience.” His role in the research typically starts when drug users and community group members come back to him with questions about the results or to explain what they found. Data from the Street Drug Analysis lab has been used to verify the effectiveness of new brands of fentanyl test strips for the local street supply and identify why some street drug users in one community were reporting strong hallucinations as side effects (it turns out that the hallucinations were 12 times more likely to occur in users whose drug supply was contaminated with medetomidine5, a potent sedative and anesthetic that was only just beginning to make its way into the street drug supply).
The Core Collaboration
The role of the Chemistry Mass Spectrometry Core in Dasgupta’s research has evolved since that first e-mail. This core facility’s business model is to train users to independently operate the instrumentation. When he kept coming back with more samples from his partner organizations to validate FTIR and other drug checking mechanism findings and to interrogate samples better suited for the GC-MS technique, Dasgupta brought another research scientist in. Erin Tracy, who had 10 years of analytical chemistry experience working in a forensic lab, works full-time in the core facility space running samples submitted to the Street Drug Analysis lab. She has desk space alongside other staff in the core facility. “It’s not even a collaboration,” Dasgupta muses. “It’s just one big team.” The relationship Dasgupta has developed with the core facility allows him and his lab the advantage of relying on the core’s expertise anytime there are new analytes in the results. “We have collaborators at other institutions, and they sometimes run into roadblocks that we just bound over” he says. “The first time we saw peptides in the samples, or the first time we saw GLP-1s, we had no idea what we were looking at or how to make sense of it. We needed the expertise of [Ehrmann and the core staff].”
When Dasgupta first reached out to the Chemistry Mass Spectrometry Core, the instrument that was best suited for his analysis, affectionately known as “Mr. G,” was older and underutilized. “At a public institution doing public health research we have an obligation as [taxpayers] and to taxpayers to fully utilize the resources that our tax money is helping to fund,” Dasgupta says. But because the machine was older, it was expensive to maintain and broke down frequently. That left community members with long wait times to get results. The immediate impact of the instrumentation to the health of people here in North Carolina led the NC Collaboratory, which provides some funding for Dasgupta’s work, to fund the purchase of a new GC-MS in 2024. When it came time to decide where to put the instrumentation, Dasgupta knew he wanted it to stay in the core. He says his team benefits too much from the close collaboration to consider moving it elsewhere. Ehrmann agrees. “There are so many things in the infrastructure that are in place that would be so difficult to change at this moment in time. Namely, the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] lab, the fact that I hold the DEA license—all of these things really matter in the grand scheme of things. Their analytical team is officed in my lab. And when things break, I’m right here.”
While Ehrmann admits that the relationship her core has with Dasgupta’s lab has grown into something unique, how it started is a story as old as time for her core facility. “For us, oftentimes we don’t think about it as the problem that the [Principal Investigator] thinks about. We just think ‘Oh, it’s another kind of molecule,’” Ehrmann explains. “We can market ourselves as a resource for anyone who finds themself in a one-off need for a small molecule mass spec problem or someone who is like ‘Oh, this is a very interesting project!’ and the next thing you know they’ve been doing this kind of science for the next 8, 10 years.” Ehrmann attributes the ability to adapt to novel research questions and molecules as key for her core facility’s success. “I think my core in particular is one of the most diverse and unique on campus in that we’re housed in Chemistry and there’s a very specific need that Chemistry has. But as a mass spectrometry core, our applications can be so diverse and our tools, our equipment, can handle so many analytical challenges that we have over the decade I’ve been here built expertise in a very broad small molecule world.”
Today, Dasgupta’s operation runs smoothly within the Chemistry Mass Spectrometry Core. But he’s quick to point out that the success of his program is due to many units at UNC Chapel Hill and in North Carolina all pulling in the same direction. From University Counsel and the Office of Sponsored Programs, which helped him set up his testing program, to the relationship needed between the Department of Chemistry, Gillings School of Public Health, and Center for Injury Research and Prevention to make the collaboration work, and the NC Collaboratory and NC General Assembly for both funding his ongoing research and equipment and also subsidizing the cost to community organizations in North Carolina to access his analysis services for free. But he is already thinking forward and relies on Ehrmann’s expertise as a core director and mass spectrometrist to help turn his ideas into actionable research questions. “[Dasgupta] sometimes comes to me with technology questions like ‘Do you think this would be possible?’, or ‘If it’s possible, what kind of mass spec would I need?’” Ehrmann says. “So, it’s been a very productive and supportive and collaborative relationship that we have.”
Dasgupta highlights the impact to the local communities they serve as the most rewarding aspect of his work. Many of the samples arrive with handwritten notes tucked inside, or notes written on the shipping containers thanking Dasgupta’s lab for their work. Collaborators started sending Erin little glass ducks as tokens of appreciation; they now line her workspace. Ehrmann remembers thinking, “I’m doing the right thing, right?” when Dasgupta initially reached out. Now she’s confident in that answer. “It’s just really cool what has grown from that one interaction and […] to hear the stories and think about [the impact].”
Read (or listen) more about Dasgupta’s work or follow him on Bluesky or X.
References
- Nabarun Dasgupta. MacArthur Foundation. Published October 8, 2025. Accessed October 29, 2025. https://guides.himmelfarb.gwu.edu/AMA/websites
- Dasgupta N, Bell A, Visnich M, Doe-Simkins M, Wheeler E, et al. Trends and characteristics during 17 years of naloxone distribution and administration through an overdose prevention program in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. PLOS ONE 2025;20(10): e0315026. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0315026
- Goldman JE, Waye KM, Periera KA, Krieger MS, Yedinak JL, Marshall BDL. Perspectives on rapid fentanyl test strips as a harm reduction practice among young adults who use drugs: a qualitative study. Harm Reduct J. 2019;16(1):3. doi: 10.1186/s12954-018-0276-0
- Peiper NC, Clarke SD, Vincent LB, Ciccarone D, Kral AH, Zibbell JE. Fentanyl test strips as an opioid overdose prevention strategy: Findings from a syringe services program in the Southeastern United States. Int J Drug Policy. 2019;63:122-128. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.08.007
- Sibley AL, Bedard ML, Tobias S, et al. Emergency of medetomidine in the unregulated drug supply and its association with hallucinogenic effects. Drug and Alc Rev. 2025. doi: 10.1111/dar.70024