Dr. Roy Gerona specialized in biochemistry and molecular neuroscience, and clinical chemistry during his graduate and post-graduate training, respectively. He currently runs and directs the Clinical Toxicology and Environmental Biomonitoring Laboratory and the TB Hair Analysis Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. He divides his time in the application of mass spectrometry in four research areas- new psychoactive substance (NPS) analysis and surveillance, environmental chemical biomonitoring, MDR-TB therapeutic drug monitoring, and drug-microbiome interaction.
His laboratory is one of the first to use high-resolution mass spectrometry in analyzing NPS in biological samples to support surveillance work. He has conducted NPS surveillance in partnership with collaborators from federal agencies and various poison centers across the United States. His partnership with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Homeland Security is instrumental to the discovery and scheduling of several synthetic cannabinoids involved in mass outbreaks between 2012 and 2017. In 2017, he established the Psychoactive Surveillance Consortium and Analysis Network (P SCAN), an integrated NPS surveillance program that combines real time NPS testing using targeted and suspect screening approaches with comprehensive clinical data collection from paired biological samples in geographically representative medical centers to guide pharmacological profiling of prevalent and anticipated (“prophetic”) NPS. Most recently, the US Drug Enforcement Administration has renewed partnership with his laboratory to respond to NPS outbreaks in the United States. Dr. Gerona is also currently helping scientists and toxicologists at UP Manila in establishing the UP Drugs of Abuse Research Laboratory.