View article

Synthetic cannabinoids (SCs) continue to be the largest group of new psychoactive substances (NPS) monitored by the European Monitoring Center of Drugs and Drugs of Abuse (EMCDDA). The identification and subsequent prohibition of single SCs has driven clandestine chemists to produce analogues of increasing structural diversity, intended to evade legislation. That structural diversity, combined with the mostly unknown metabolic profiles of these new SCs, poses a big challenge for the conventional targeted analytical assays, as it is difficult to screen for “unknown” compounds. Therefore, an alternative screening method, not directly based on the structure but on the activity of the SC, may offer a solution for this problem. We generated stable CB1 and CB2 receptor activation assays based on functional complementation of a split NanoLuc luciferase and used these to test an expanded set of recent SCs (UR …