Congratulations to Dr. Kathleen Hayes!

Author: Marya Lieberman

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!  

 

2023 Kathleen Kat Hayes Copy
2023 Kathleen Kat Hayes Copy

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Congratulations to Naxos Neighbors and Marya Lieberman, winners of ND Lucy Institute's $51,000 Next Changemaker Prize

Author: Marya Lieberman

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.  …

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Ola presents NIR project at NOBCChe

Author: Marya Lieberman

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!  

 

2023 Olatunde At Nobcche Meeting

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Heather Whitehead and Kathleen Hayes published in Forensic Chemistry, part 2

Author: Marya Lieberman

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.  …

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How does the Scott Test for cocaine work?

Author: Marya Lieberman

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

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Turkey Run 2022

Author: Marya Lieberman

2022 Group At Turkey Run Analytical Conference Heather And Kat Organizers
The Lieberman group takes a moment to relax at Turkey Run

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!  …

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Congratulations to Olatunde Awosiji Awotunde, Nicholas Roseboom, and Jin Cai!

Author: Marya Lieberman

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.  …

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Congratulations to Heather Whitehead, whose paper on instrument-free detection of DNA with Nile Blue was just accepted by Analytical Methods!

Author: Marya Lieberman

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 dye that binds to DNA and a cell phone to measure the concentration of double stranded DNA in the same concentration range commonly used to analyze NAT results. The color of Nile Blue dye shifts from blue to blue-purple to blue  as it binds to DNA.  While it's been known for many years that Nile Blue dye changes color when it binds to DNA, and that property has been used to develop instrumental assays, Heather figured out that by using different concentrations of the Nile Blue dye and monitoring the red, green, and blue channel intensities, the concentration of double stranded DNA can be measured with an error of less than 10 ug/ml.  …

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Health systems model shows cost-effectiveness of screening amoxicillin quality

Author: Marya Lieberman

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 the effectiveness and cost savings of incorporating PADs and aPADs in amoxicillin quality surveillance in Kenya. We compared the current testing scenario (batches of entire samples tested by HPLC) with an expedited HPLC scenario (testing smaller batches at a time), as well as a screening scenario using PADs/aPADs to identify poor-quality amoxicillin followed by confirmatory analysis with HPLC. The PADs/aPADs screening scenario identified and removed poor-quality antibiotics faster than the expedited or regular HPLC scenarios, and reduced costs significantly. The model estimates that use of early screening tests could avert 360-870 pneumonia deaths per year in children under age 5 while reducing the number of HPLC tests required. …

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Oopsy!

Author: Marya Lieberman

A US pharmaceutical company just announced a recall of two lots of drugs which were "inadvertently mixed up" by the manufacturer.…

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PhD defense

Author: Marya Lieberman

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. …

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US Pharmacopiea evaluates PADs as pharmaceutical screening technology

Author: Marya Lieberman

USP's Technology Review report on the PAD is now published.

Executive Summary

The paper analytical device (PAD) was developed as a cost-effective tool for field screening of a wide variety of pharmaceutical dosage forms in low-resource settings. The PAD is produced by wax printing on Ahlstrom 319 paper, which is a fast chromatography paper that creates separate reaction lanes and contains trace quantities of chemical reagents to create color changes in response to different pharmaceutical articles. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been continued upsurge of substandard and falsified (SF) medical products, especially those that claimed to be a possible treatment for the disease (e.g., azithromycin, chloroquine, and hydroxychloroquine), and which the PAD can be used to screen the products for quality. With the help of appropriate analytical techniques and methodologies, a preliminary laboratory study was conducted on all the samples used in the performance validation of the PAD to ascertain the quality status of each sample prior to the validation study on the PAD. The validation study was performed on the PAD by three different scientists using three different brands each of seven finished dosage forms (FDFs), their respective active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), SF formulations, and selected fillers (pharmaceuticals excipients). Upon evaluation of all data generated by the three scientists at the end of the validation study, the PAD was determined to be effective in identifying the active ingredients in all the samples collected for evaluation. The technology was also able to detect fillers such as corn starch present in some of the FDFs and formulations labeled to contain them. Results of the laboratory identification tests performed were consistent with those obtained with PAD by all three scientists. All SF formulations were prepared as per the study protocol, and all falsified formulations were correctly identified as falsified by the PAD. However, the PAD was incapable of distinguishing between substandard or degraded formulations (even those with 50% APIs) and good quality products and formulations and their respective pure APIs, making it impossible for the technology to be used to screen substandard products. Only falsified products were able to be identified correctly.

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