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 in the piece. …
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 drugs such as fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, xylazine, benzodiazepines, and nitazines. These superpotent opioids are associated with over 100 fatal overdose per year in this county and cause many other types of harm to people who use drugs, their families and friends, and the entire community. …
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 of common drugs and drug metabolites published in 2022. …
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.
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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 settings, and others never make it out of the lab. …
Turkey Run Analytical Conference 2022 was held at Turkey Run State Park in Indiana, and attracted researchers from Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. In addition to Heather, Kat, Alyssa, Rachel, and Ornella, undergraduates Devena and Sarah presented posters, and Yukun from the Peaslee group also gave a poster. Congratulations to Heather Whitehead and Kathleen Hayes for organizing a great scientific meeting! …
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 from authentic products in order to identify real and fake formulations. In this paper, we developed a simple training method that uses binary mixtures of a pharmaceutical (acetaminophen) with two different cutting agents, and used several different data analysis models to extrapolate the training samples to real and fake samples of popular brands of acetaminophen tablets. While none of the models was able to correctly classify all the samples, a simple voting algorithm was able to compensate for the weaknesses of the models and classify 93% of the samples correctly. …
Working with the ARTiFACT Verify team, we are developing a system to monitor every stage of post-market surveillance, from sample collection to assay reports and dashboarding. The pilot of the Verify system…
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 scientific practice.
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