Bitter Pills
Check out the NPR interview with Muhammad Zaman about his book "Bitter Pills: The Global War on Counterfeit Drugs". He is the BU prof who developed a portable dissolution testing device
Recent review of PADs for pharmaceutical analysis
This review was written by the Nepal/St Mary's team:
By: Sharma, Niraj; Barstis, Toni; Giri, Basant
…Blockchain Working Group awards grant to PAD project
Our proposal titled "The whole world is watching: tracking bad quality medicine with citizen science and an electronic ledger" was funded by the Notre Dame Blockchain Working Group for 2018! Computer scientists James and Chris Sweet will work with the PAD project to institute a distributed electronic ledger that can track test results for particular products. We look forward to using this new methodology for determining the reliability of different actors in the pharmaceutical supply chain. …
PAD patent licensed to Veripad LLC
Notre Dame has licensed the PAD technology to Veripad, LLC. This startup company has developed a cell-phone based PAD reader that automatically analyzes the PAD image for the user. Watch for more developments!
Veripad's mobile application reads the result from the PAD test…
PADs on PBS Newshour
PBS Newshour for Dec. 14 included an 8 min segment on falsified and substandard medicines in Kenya. Mercy Maina (Pharmacist at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital) appears on this segment to demo some PADs and discuss the public health problems caused by falsified antibiotics. Congrats on the coverage! …
Veripad wins $50,000 at Mass Challenge Accelerator
Congratulations to the Veripad team, which received $50K in equity-free support from this round of the Mass Challenge accelerator program. This award will be matched 1:1 by funds from Grand Challenges Canada through its Transition to Scale program with the University of Notre Dame, "Got Fakes?". …
Veripad named as Top 26 startup at Mass Challenge Accelerator
Veripad is a startup company that uses PAD technology and a cell phone reader app to detect suspicious pharmaceuticals. They were just selected to compete for a share of $USD 1.5 million in the Mass Challenge Accelerator program. …
Detect adulterated milk with a paper test card
Milk is an important food for people in many countries, but adulteration is all too common. Suppliers of fraudulent milk might add water to increase the volume of their product, and then put in sugars, urea, or starch to restore the density, taste, and appearance of the milk. In a recent publication…
Paper could be the key!
Laboratory Equipment put together a nice piece on the PAD project, featuring Toni Barstis's team at Saint Marys College and Veripad. …
St Mary's students deploy PADs in Nepal
Under the guidance of Prof. Toni Barstis, students from Saint Marys College are using PADs to test drug quality in Nepal.
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Training a computer to read PAD test cards
Sandipan Banerjee has been training a neural network to recognize the color signatures from different types of pharmaceuticals. The program is nearly as accurate as human readers.
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Saving Lives at Birth
We're excited to be named as a finalist for the Round 7 Saving Lives at Birth seed award. Our innovation wll help birth attendants to treat bleeding after childbirth with high quality medicines that can save lives.
Fighting iodine malnutrition with a paper test card
When kids don't get enough iodine in their diet, growth and brain development are stunted. We developed a paper test card to help medical authorities and nutrition specialists monitor the need for iodine supplements in different populations.
Full details are available open access at PLOS-ONE
Veripad selected for 2017 Mass Challenge Accelerator program
PAD commercialization takes another step towards reality. Veripad joins 127 other startup companies in this prestigious startup accelerator's 2017 class. Over 5,000 applications were evaluated. In addition to support and mentoring, the team will have access to a premium makerspace and research lab that will be a great starting point for manufacturing prototyping and lane chemistry development. …
Margaret Berta explains how data sharing helps with analysis of medicines from the developing world
Hesburgh Libraries and the Center for Research Computing convened a workshop May 1 and 2, 2017, to discuss how libraries can faciliate preservation and sharing of data. These tasks are more and more important for researchers in the digital age. Margaret Berta gave a nice example of how her research uses Open Science Framework to enable students at 18 different institutions to collaborate on pharmaceutical analysis problems. The electronic site is used to distribute shared experimental protocols, upload electronic lab notebooks, review results and calculations in a secure and private manner, and archive data and workflows for publication. …
Sarah Bliese wins 4 year Naughton Fellowship
Chemistry graduate student Sarah Bliese plans to make a difference in the health of people all over the world through her 2017 Naughton Graduate Fellowship. Air pollutants cause thousands of deaths each year. However, in much of the developing world, technological infrastructure for collecting even basic measurements about air quality is absent, so regulators have little to act upon. Only 10 of the 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have even a single air quality monitoring station reporting to WHO today. Sarah will develop and test a new type of sensor network. The network uses small numbers of sensor pods to calibrate hundreds of inexpensive paper test cards that can be deployed by citizen scientists--even by high school students.
PADs at Italian Training Course on Falsification and Counterfeiting of Medicinal Products
Dr. Sergio Caroli presented the PAD card in a post-doctoral level training course on April 6, 2017. The training course was sponsored by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, the Italian equivalent of the National Institutes of Health.
PAD reveals unexpected filler in Coartem antimalarial product…
Troy HS demos PADs
Quinn Favret and Arnav Ramu at Troy HS in Michigan worked on a project to solve the problem of counterfeit drugs and came across the PAD project. We sent them some samples to show in their presentation. Good luck to these young problem solvers! …
PADs in Bangladesh?
The national quality control lab for pharmaceuticals in Bangladesh is a busy site; the photo shows dissolution testing in progress. Prof. Lieberman visited in mid-March to discuss use of PADs as a component of risk-based quality screening. Although the lab in Dhaka is fully modern and another lab in Chittagong is also set up for pharmacopeia assays, there are many inspectors who work in areas which are not as well equiped. For these inspectors, PADs could help in determining which samples are most important for full lab analysis. …
Paper centrifuge spins at 125,000 rpm
Manu Prakash has done it again--following up his $1 paper microscope with a hand-powered paper centrifuge that can spin down blood samples at a blistering 125,000 rpm. This piece in the Atlantic…
Nick headlines College of Science website
Nick's elevator pitch at the 2016 Micronutrient Formum in Cancun is the subject of an article posted at the UND College of Science website. Congratulations! …
Muriel McClendon wins poster award at international research conference
PAD project REU'er Muriel McClendon was recognized for her work in the summer of 2016.
On November 11, 2016, in Tampa, FL, Muriel McClendon placed fifth in the Chemistry Division at the ABRCMS Conference (Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students…
New blog to watch
This blog focuses on new technologies with potential to impact global heath. The PAD project is highlighted in the 14 Nov. 2016 posting.
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Nick's fast pitch on iodine nutrition brings him $1,000
Nicholas Myers pitched the saltPAD at the Micronutrient Forum in Cancun Mexico, explaining how this simple paper device could help program managers monitor iodine nutrition. He won second prize, out of a field of 70 entrants from 18 countries. The pitch was repeated in 1 minute format at the gala dinner attended by all 700 conference attendees. Kudos to Nick! …
Jamie Luther wins poster prize at MUACC
Jamie Luther presented a poster at the October 12 MUACC meeting at the University of Illinios Urbana-Champaign and received a poster prize from the assembled analytical chemists. The poster described the "milkPAD" she is developing to detect adulteration of dairy milk, a bit of unsavory product manipulation that was quite familiar to Henry Thoreau. …
Jamie Luther presents at AWIS graduate student conference
See the COS web site for an article featuring Jamie Luther and her AWIS presentation about the milkPAD! …
Trouble in Chinese regulatory system
Derek Lowe's blog "In the Pipeline" reports on a story about massive problems in regulatory oversight of drug approval in China.
A report in the Chinese newspaper Economic Information Daily says that the Chinese SFDA (State Food and Drug Administration) has been conducting a review of Chinese clinical trial practices, and after reviewing 1,622 trials has found that most of them are seriously flawed. And by “seriously flawed”, they mean “largely faked”.
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Counterfeit medicines cost lives
The BBC features interviews with Sproxil and mPedigree about the counterfeit drug problem in Africa.
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Death of Prince due to falsified hydrocodone
Pills marked as hydrocodone contained fentanyl, an overdose of which was the cause of death determined in June by the Midwest medical examiner's office. Full report in StarTribune…