The 2019 Lumen Christi award was presented to Heather DiLallo, who has worked for many years with the PAD project at Saint Mary's. Heather is a Chemistry major who has worked to detect falsified medicines in Nepal and China through Toni Barstis's IRES program. She is in the 5-year dual degree program, and will be continuing her engineering coursework next academic year at Notre Dame. We look forward to seeing her around campus! …
Alec is working on color tests for detection of caffeine as a cutting agent in cocaine. He was recognized at the Friday COS-JAM session. Well done! …
Madeline was selected as a recipient of an AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship in the amount of $20000 for the 2019-20 award year. …
Meghanne is working to discover environmental lead in pre-1978 homes without using children as the detection tool. …
I'm at the icddr,b site in Bandarban, and sharing the facility with about 800 boxes of shoes donated by shoe company Tom's. They promise that for every pair they sell in the US, they'll donate a pair of shoes to children in need. Looks like they are following through. The community health workers distribute the shoes when they're doing their other duties. Photo coming later. …
Marya Lieberman gave a workshop about post-market surveillance for 40 staff members from the Directorate General of Drug Administration in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the National Control Lab, and WHO-PQM.
The workshop included a fun project to evaluate the supply chain of a medicine which involved 28 neophytes analyzing samples from a fictional country. The PAD reader box also made its first debut outside Notre Dame. This smart PAD reader will be sited in Bandarban at the icddr,b field office, where a small sampling project will be based in 2019. …
ASTMH Journal has a good review of policy options for combatting falsified and substandard medicines--link here.
Abstract: Falsified and substandard medicines are associated with tens of thousands of deaths, mainly in young children in poor countries. Poor-quality drugs exact an annual economic toll of up to US$200 billion and contribute to the increasing peril of antimicrobial resistance. The WHO has emerged recently as the global leader in the battle against poor-quality drugs, and pharmaceutical companies have increased their roles in assuring the integrity of drug supply chains. Despite advances in drug quality surveillance and detection technology, more efforts are urgently required in research, policy, and field monitoring to halt the pandemic of bad drugs. In addition to strengthening international and national pharmaceutical governance, in part by national implementation of the Model Law on Medicines and Crime, a quantifiable Sustainable Development Goal target and an international convention to insure drug quality and safety are urgent priorities.…
Some coverage of Dr. Lieberman's talk at the AAAS national meeting in DC.
R&D Magazine reporting about how paper analytical device was used to detect falsified medicines and the results from our Tanzania MSH implementation study.…
In analytical chemistry, everything depends on access to high quality reference materials. The US Pharmacopeia donated over $5,000 worth of reference standards to the PAD project in 2019. Thanks for this contribution to our work!
Our NSF project to track illicit supply chains using paper analytical devices made the Notre Dame news page...https://research.nd.edu/news/scientists-take-aim-at-illicit-supply-chain-networks-of-fake-medications/
Back row: Sarah B, Meg B, Madeline S, Margaret B, Meghanne T, Nils O. Front row: Galen B, Rachel M, Tracy L-C, Dr. L, Jessica Z
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The Medicine Quality and Public Health conference at Oxford University had 200 participants from over 50 countries, including the Directors General of the Tanzanian and Nigerian drug regulatory agencies and academics, NGOs, WHO, and pharmaceutical companies.
Marya Lieberman and Philip Coyne attended and gave several presentations. …
At the Oxford MQPH conference, Marya Lieberman presented in a session titled Screening Technologies: Will they Save the Day? The talk was captured by the sketch artist. Here we see a summary of how the PAD works and the results of the supply chain exercise that the 20 students in the short course obtained the previous week. …
https://news.nd.edu/news/scientists-take-aim-at-illicit-supply-chain-networks-of-fake-medications/…
Dr Mercy Maina getting a shout out from Ivanka Trump at the Mandela Washington Fellowship Summit, Washington DC. https://youtu.be/RMhfdE9zeCc…
The National Science Foundation has awarded our team an exploratory grant to use PADs to detect and dismantle supply chains for bad quality pharmaceuticals. We will work with Professor Karen Smilowitz at Northwestern, who studies logistics and management of health care systems, and with three international partners. Dr. Mercy Maina is a pharmacist at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, Kenya who has a long standing interest in pharmaceutical supply chains, pharmacovigilence, and quality management; Dr. Wasif Ali Khan is a research scientist at the Institute for the study of Diarrheal Diseases, Bangladesh, which has research centers in rural Bangladesh where the bulk of the population lives, and Mr. Ibrahim Chikowe is an instructor in the College of Medicine, University of Malawi. …
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
This review was written by the Nepal/St Mary's team:
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. …
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…
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! …
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 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. …
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…
Laboratory Equipment put together a nice piece on the PAD project, featuring Toni Barstis's team at Saint Marys College and Veripad. …
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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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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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.
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
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. …