Hound Labs of California has secured $30 million in financing to begin commercial manufacturing of what it says will be the first workable marijuana breathalyzer.
The investments followed the announcement of a clinical trial, conducted at the University of California-San Francisco, that confirmed the Hound Labs device could detect marijuana in the breath of users for two to three hours after consumption. Hound said this would enable recent marijuana usage to be distinguished from past usage that no longer could be causing impairment.
“Legalization of marijuana is disrupting multiple facets of society and creating a unique need for a technology that helps employers and law enforcement agencies detect recent marijuana use but doesn’t penalize people who legally and responsibly use marijuana,” said Howard Goodwin, partner at Intrinsic Capital Partners, one of the company’s investors.
“With commercial production of its marijuana breathalyzer already under way, Hound Labs is optimally positioned to meet the pent-up demand for the only tool that measures recent marijuana use without identifying someone who legally consumed marijuana the prior night or last weekend,” he said, according to a company press release.
Results of the clinical trial were published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Clinical Chemistry by Dr. Kara Lynch, co-director of the clinical chemistry and toxicology laboratory at San Francisco General Hospital and associate professor of laboratory medicine at UCSF.
Lynch reported that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) can be reliably detected throughout a three-hour window after marijuana is smoked by measuring complex molecules in breath at extraordinarily low levels—to one trillionth of a gram per liter of breath. She wrote that the findings are significant because people are typically most impaired during those three hours.
“We are excited to usher in a new era of more meaningful and fair drug testing now that marijuana is both medically and recreationally available to so many people,” said Mike Lynn, M.D., chief executive officer and co-founder of Hound Labs.
