Fentanyl test strips are an important tool for detecting opioids that can cause fatal overdoses.
By testing over 200 fentanyl analogs with two brands of fentanyl test strips (FTS), Kathleen Hayes found that the test strips can detect many, but not all, fentanyl analogs. The types of analogs…
Reporting from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism features the chemoPAD project; chemoPAD team members Dr. Paul Ndom, Prof. Marya Lieberman, and Prof. Ayenew Ashenef are quoted…
June 22, 2023--After defending her dissertation, "Methods for Pharmaceutical and Illicit Drug Analysis," Kathleen Hayes is now a PhD and will move on to Abbvie as a medical writer. Good luck Kat, we will miss you!
…Joanne Cogdell, CEO of harm reduction organization Naxos Neighbors, and her collaborator Marya Lieberman, University of Notre Dame, were awarded the 2023 Next Changemaker Award from the Lucy Institute for Data and Society. The award of $51,000 will support our efforts to find emerging hazards in street…
The goal of the ChemoPAD project is to use paper analytical devices to screen the quality of chemotherapy drugs in sub-Saharan Africa. The team includes collaborators from seven institutions and five countries.
Olatunde Awosiji Awotunde presented a poster on "Combining orthogonal analytical techniques to identify substandard or falsified formulations of pharmaceuticals " at the 2023 NOBCChE meeting. Congratulations to Ola on representing Notre Dame at this national event!
Ola and Ornella were admitted as PhD candidates in May of 2023, congratulations!
Congratulations to Heather and Kat--their manuscript, "Development and validation of a liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry method for the analysis of 53 benzodiazepines in illicit drug samples," was just accepted by Forensic Chemistry! This manuscript follows the earlier method for analysis…
Heather Whitehead defended her PhD thesis March 30, 2023. Congratulations to Dr. Whitehead as she moves on to take EPA by storm as an ORISE EPA Fellow!
Interview in Chemical and Engineering News highlights our group's work to detect substandard and falsified pharmaceuticals. …
The Scott test has been used for over 50 years as a presumptive test for cocaine. It involves a series of reagent additions and color changes...and if it's not done and interpreted correctly, it can send innocent people to jail. This crystal structure now published in Acta Cryst E gives insight into what's going on in the test.
Bis(N,N-diethyl-4-methyl-4-piperazine-1-carboxamide) tetrakis(isothiocyanato-κN)cobalt(II), a model compound for the blue color developed in the Scott test. Oliver, A. G., Lockwood, T.-L. E., Zinna, J. & Lieberman, M. (2023). Acta Cryst. E79, 163-166
This paper shares a tandem mass spectroscopy method for quantitative analysis of 22 drugs and drug metabolites. The samples were harvested from used idPADs; we used this method, along with fentanyl and benzo test strips, to analyze 124 samples of illicit drugs collected from the Chicago area in 2021-2022. …
This commentary article, "Considerations for the design and implementation of point-of-care technology for use in low- and middle-income countries," uses the PAD project to reflect on why some technologies can be implemented in low-resource…
Alyssa signed up for an early ARP time and passed with flying colors! Congratulations, Alyssa.
Discrimination of Substandard and Falsified Formulations from Genuine Pharmaceuticals Using NIR Spectra and Machine Learning
Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is a low-cost analytical tool for rapid characterization of pharmaceuticals. Usually, it's necessary to build up a "library" of NIR spectra…
Using Paper Microfluidics as a Platform for Increasing Inquiry in the Analytical Laboratory
K. Frederick, A.L. Van Wyk, R.S. Cole, M. Lieberman, R. Roller
Rachel Roller makes the case that paper labware can change the nature of laboratory instruction so it's closer to authentic…
Many nucleic acid tests (NATs) rely on a DNA amplification step as the detection mechanism for pathogens, viral load, and so on. Usually, DNA concentration is measured using a spectrophotometric instrument that costs tens of thousands of dollars. In this paper, Heather Whitehead used an inexpensive…
Kat Hayes was selected as the People's Choice winner of the 2021 Shaheen 3-minute Thesis contest. Using one static slide, no jargon, and 3 minutes of time, contestants had to explain their graduate research to a general university audience.
Heather is the first author on this manuscript with Graham Peaslee, which has been accessed over 66,000 times--it's one of EST's most highly accessed articles in 2021!
Environ.…
Ola is working on data analytics for pharmaceutical analysis,…
Sarah Bliese's paper with the Ozawa group at NC State is now published! Sachiko Ozawa's group developed an agent-based model, ESTEEM (Examining Screening Technologies with Economic Evaluations for Medicines), to estimate…
Undergraduate Kyle Moon was selected as a recipient for a $300 undergraduate research grant from the Eck Insitute of Global Health. Kyle is working on a rapid and instrument-free test for childhood lead exposure. Good luck on this project, Kyle!
Congratulations to Dr. Sarah Bliese on her successful defense of her PhD thesis, entitled "DEVELOPING SCREENING TECHNOLOGIES FOR LOW RESOURCE SETTINGS". Sarah is headed to Virginia.
