A day after ALERT and Alberta Health Services raised the alarm over a new, powerful and deadly drug being found in Alberta – more details on where W-18 originated are being uncovered.

On Wednesday, ALERT said four kilograms of a chemical powder was seized in Edmonton as part of a fentanyl investigation in December, 2015.

Several weeks later, and with help from Health Canada, ALERT discovered the powder was W-18, a drug that’s one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, and 10,000 times more powerful than morphine.

Investigators said the amount of powder seized could have produced hundreds of millions of pills.

“This drug was found by people that were interested in making new analgesics, and that’s what the patent is called, so they made a bunch of drugs that are based on the structure of morphine,” Dr. Bill Colmers, a pharmacology professor, said.

The creator of W-18 lives in Edmonton – he didn’t comment Thursday, but the retired professor spoke to Maclean’s Magazine in March, and said the purpose of creating W-18 was to make a non-addictive pain killer, a “miracle drug”.

The professor was experimenting with chemical compounds, and the patent was filed in 1982, but was never picked up by a pharmaceutical company.

Since then, the patent expired, and experts say chemists in China are bringing it back.

“Chemists are going back now and resynthesizing these compounds in an effort, in this case, to get a legal high, something that is not regulated but will give you the same desired effects,” Forensic Chemist Brian Escamilla told CTV News in a phone interview from California.

A number of compounds were created – but W-18 is the most powerful.

The U of A is disappointed the research that is now available in the public domain is being used in such a way.

Officials said the drug was never tested outside a lab.

“Pharma companies are outstandingly good at taking a molecule and seeing if it’s suitable for use in a clinic,” Dr. Colmers said. “But of course, this process never happened in the case of W-18.”

With files from Michel Boyer