Taking her science to the streets

Marya Lieberman decided to let the local community’s needs drive her scientific process. She found herself out of the lab and on the front lines of the opioid epidemic.

Your friendly neighborhood analytical chemist: If there is such a thing, Marya Lieberman embodies it. The 28-year veteran of Notre Dame’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry faculty invariably appears with a broad smile and a hair color that seems to emanate from her effervescent personality—sometimes heliotrope purple, sometimes neon blue.

You’ll spot Lieberman not just in the corridors of Stepan Chemistry Hall, where she leads a lab bustling with graduate students, but also around the city of South Bend, where she maintains an extensive list of community partners and field testing sites.

Her work revolves, in fact, around the idea of getting both yourself and your chemistry out of the lab.

“We use lab-based techniques to analyze samples we collect in the field,” she said, “but our real specialty is in designing chemical tests that can occur in the community, where they can lead to a bigger and more immediate impact.”

Anyone who has watched a strip of pH paper change colors in a glass of lemon juice has a sense of what a chemical test outside the lab might look like. Like a pH strip, Lieberman’s designs are lightweight, low-cost, and simple to use—not as a matter of convenience but rather to enable a kind of “citizen science,” where members of the public participate in gathering data.

For Lieberman, involving the public is essential at every stage of the scientific process.

“The crucial first step in all science,” she explains, “is to refine the question you’re trying to answer. You can have the most advanced analytical techniques, but if you’re not engaged in analyzing something that matters—that makes a difference to people’s lives—then your science won’t make an impact. That’s where the community comes in. When we’re asking questions that have to do with the community’s needs, then we are in a better place to work alongside the community in gathering data and implementing a solution.”

The value of Lieberman’s approach became apparent in 2016 when she grew concerned hearing news reports about the number of children in the local community suffering from the effects of lead poisoning. Along with colleagues in public health, data science, and physics, Lieberman helped launch Notre Dame’s Lead Innovation Team, and she used her lab’s expertise to develop low-cost lead screening kits, which were ultimately provided free of charge to the local community.

“Putting tests in people’s hands empowers them,” Lieberman said. “Lead abatement can be a daunting, expensive process, leading many people to avoid finding out about lead in the paint, dust, soil, or water where they live. But if you give people the power to understand more deeply where the lead is located and what the risks and costs might be, you give them the power to make decisions to keep themselves and their families safe.”

A few years later, a new, even more daunting problem appeared on Lieberman’s radar—not from the news but from a contact in the coroner’s office in Indianapolis.

“We began hearing about ‘overdose epidemics,“ where paramedics were responding to as many as 20 calls a day for drug overdose–related emergencies, many of them from the very same block,” she recalled. “Something completely new had entered the drug supply, and people were unaware of what they were taking.”

The problem, it turned out, was statewide. Drug overdose deaths across Indiana had quadrupled between 2000 and 2014. Especially concerning was the arrival of new synthetic opioids. Deaths in Indiana related to these drugs increased 600 percent between 2012 and 2016. The major culprit was fentanyl, a drug similar to morphine but 50 to 100 times more powerful. (For most people, a dose of just two milligrams—a fraction of the weight of a drop of water—could prove fatal.)

But the problem was more difficult than just weeding out fentanyl. The problem was the way the drug supply fluctuated, with new, unfamiliar, unmarked substances appearing unexpectedly. There were numerous variants of fentanyl, for example—acetylfentanyl, acrylfentanyl, carfentanil, furanylfentanyl—and there was also xylazine, a kind of tranquilizer approved only for use in animals that, when combined with fentanyl, can become lethal.

Just as with lead poisoning, Lieberman saw that a quick, low-cost test for fentanyl and other drugs was the answer—not one that could end the opioid epidemic, certainly, but one that could have an immediate impact, preventing overdoses and giving people second chances they otherwise would not have.

“We too often lose sight of the fact that drug overdoses are almost always accidental and are quite often treatable to save the life of the person who overdoses,” she said. “With a quick test, people can gain information about a drug. After a person has tested their drug, they might decide to use that drug in a much safer way or even not to take it at all. That information could be literally life-saving.”

To get testing strips into the hands of people who use drugs, Lieberman partners with local community organization Naxos Neighbors. The organization encourages a compassionate, nonjudgmental approach known as “harm reduction” and powers that approach with innovative technologies. Naxos Neighbors delivers test strips and trains people to use them. Then Naxos Neighbors collects them and returns them to Lieberman’s lab for further analysis that reveals a real-time picture of the current drug supply.

Joanne Kelley Cogdell, CEO of Naxos Neighbors, pointed out that “the most important people who have the most accurate and timely data on the drug supply are people who use drugs. Until we include them in the process, we are not going to solve this problem.”

Lieberman received seed funding from Notre Dame’s Community Health and Clinical Partnerships through the Emerging Opportunities in Health program in 2022. Then, in 2023, Lieberman and Cogdell were awarded the 2023 Next Changemaker Award from Notre Dame’s Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society and the Trailblazer Award from the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, both of which provided additional funding to support their ongoing efforts.

Lieberman’s lab is using these resources to develop methods to analyze used strips for more than 70 types of drugs. The lab relays its findings back to Naxos Neighbors, which shares alerts with law enforcement, first responders, medical care providers, and community organizations to inform them about what substances they may encounter in their work.

“Alerts and real-time data collection are critical because the drug supply changes so quickly,” Lieberman said. Small changes in the data can inform critical decisions that occur during or after an overdose.

“Although in most overdoses, there is an opportunity to intervene and save the person’s life, first responders need a picture of what a person who has overdosed may have taken,” Lieberman said. “When paramedics show up, they can use an overdose-reversing drug like Narcan. Then, the person might start breathing but not wake up. So responders could give multiple doses of Narcan, not realizing that another drug such as xylazine caused the overdose.”

“When someone seeks addiction recovery help,” Lieberman said, “that person may think they are addicted to a particular substance, such as heroin, but they may not realize they were also addicted to something else they had been taking without their knowledge, such as benzodiazepines. Health care providers and addiction recovery coaches can’t help them as effectively if they don’t realize what the addiction stems from.”

At the same time that Lieberman’s lab is sharing its data with the community, the researchers are also using that data to advance the science of drug testing and to improve testing strips. As part of a study recently published in the Harm Reduction Journal, Lieberman and her graduate student Kathleen Hayes tested more than 200 fentanyl analogs, or variants, using existing test strips. They discovered that these widely used strips have “blind spots,” meaning they can detect some but not all fentanyl analogs. The lab now leads an ongoing effort to monitor the effectiveness of different brands of test strips. Lieberman is also collaborating across campus with fellow chemistry professor Jon Camden and chemical and biomolecular engineering professors Matthew Webber and Yichun Wang to identify new detection methods that could help create the next generation of drug testing strips.

Since Lieberman’s work now involves not just testing dust, paint, water, and soil for lead, but also testing illegal drugs, she has built a new set of partnerships—those with local law enforcement and federal and state drug agencies. As the first facility on Notre Dame’s campus to work with illegal drugs, Lieberman’s lab had to undergo a construction project that added a special high-security inner room equipped with a camera that delivers a video feed of the activities in the room to law enforcement. Her lab gained approval from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the Indiana Board of Pharmacy and developed relationships with the St. Joseph County sheriff and prosecutor and with Chief Analyst John Rorabeck at the Berrien County Forensic Laboratory at Andrews University.

Although the project has involved added security—including building a literal wall—the most gratifying part for Lieberman has been the way the project breaks walls down. When asked about the ways her fieldwork is serving the local community’s needs, Lieberman often paused to express discomfort with the idea, preferring to point out that “the field is here, and we are the community.” She said a far-reaching problem like the opioid epidemic makes that clear.

“We tend to think of drug addiction and overdose affecting a certain kind of person—a person who is different from us,” she said. “But when I started working on this project, I was really surprised by how many of my friends, neighbors, and colleagues talked to me about how they had been impacted by the opioid crisis—some had lost a family member to an overdose; some had struggled with addiction themselves. We know that for every person who overdoses, there are seven to 10 family members and friends who are strongly impacted. When we touch this problem, we touch those lives as well.”

Support is always available if you or someone in your life is struggling with substance use. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website for help and resources.