XenoLyte

When I first became a Drug and Alcohol Testing Officer about ten years ago, we were still collecting raw saliva from donors who failed a test and sending it by post to the lab. In Australia’s heat, that was a nightmare. Compounds like THC are lipophilic, they cling to plastics and break down with temperature, so results were often unreliable.

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In 2021, Australia and New Zealand adopted AS/NZS 4760:2019, introducing Appendix C2, which requires devices to achieve at least 70% analyte recovery under realistic transport conditions. This was a step forward, but it also cemented a monopoly: only one multinational manufacturer held verification for a compliant oral-fluid buffer.

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Some agencies, such as NSW Police, avoided the issue by using collection systems outside the standard. But NATA-accredited or reputable drug-testing providers can’t do that, they must use devices verified under AS/NZS 4760. So the question became: what’s the alternative?

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From Curiosity to Creation

In mid-2025, during a quiet spell between projects, I began experimenting. I wanted to see how long drug analytes could survive in different buffer conditions. First in alkaline solutions, then progressively more acidic ones. I sourced Quantisal devices for comparison and started testing against an off-the-shelf pH 4.0 buffer from Australian Chemical Reagents (ACR) in South Australia.

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The ACR buffer held up well for most analytes, until it came to THC, the perennial 'problem child' of drug testing. Preserving THC is uniquely difficult because it adheres to plastics and glass. That led me to explore surfactants, particularly non-ionic surfactants like Tween20, which form micelles that keep THC suspended in solution rather than bound to container walls.

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After months of iteration and validation trials, the formulation that became XenoLyte consistently achieved strong recovery across all key drug classes, including cannabinoids, even after prolonged exposure to heat and transport stress.

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A New Chapter

XenoLyte is now undergoing independent C2 verification at a NATA-accredited laboratory, scheduled for November 2025.

 

Regardless of the outcome, this work marks the beginning of a broader push toward innovation in Australian toxicology.

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The formulation itself remains proprietary, but the philosophy isn’t: innovation doesn’t belong only to big corporations. With persistence, scientific rigour, and a bit of curiosity, it’s possible to create something just as effective (or even better) right here in Australia.

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In recent years, funding changes have pushed the CSIRO and other research bodies toward a “profit-for-science” mindset. The risk in that approach is that we can’t always predict which discoveries will become valuable, not in five years, and certainly not in fifty.

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When Quantisal was first developed, there was little sense of a commercial market for oral-fluid buffers (Australia didn’t require them until 2021, and oral-fluid testing remains uncommon in the United States) yet it now dominates drug testing across Australia and New Zealand. Likewise, when I began experimenting with buffer fluids, I had no plan to make a product; only curiosity.

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Curiosity, not profit, is where the next breakthroughs start.

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Daniel Patterson
Forensic Toxicologist | Director, Northern Rivers Toxicology
Inventor – XenoLyte