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…
ACS press conference on PAD project
Prof Lieberman interview with Chemistry World
MITI health battles poor quality drugs in Kisumu region
MITI Health was started by Stanford medical student Jessica Vernon as a way to provide high quality medicines to pharmacists in Kenya. The PAD project and AMPATH are partners with MITI Health; we help them conduct confirmatory assays on suspicious products. This KQED news piece describes how a simple app enables pharmacists to buy high quality products. …
Problems in Kenyan Pharmacy and Poisons Board?
Business Daily Africa reports on a whistleblower's claims that in exchange for bribes, the Pharmacy and Poisons board issued permits for non-registered suppliers to import low-quality drugs into Kenya between 2005 and 2011. The Chief Registrar is implicated in the claims. We'll be following this story. …
SMC press release on PAD patent
July 26, 2016 (Notre Dame, Ind.) — The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued US Patent No. 9,354,181 to researchers at Saint Mary’s College and the University of Notre Dame who together developed user-friendly devices that detect low-quality pharmaceuticals. It is Saint Mary’s first patent and the first for two of the three professors. These unique Paper Analytical Devices (PADs) can detect multiple chemical components in a pill or capsule, including substitute drugs or “fillers” that may be added in place of an active ingredient.…
REU students return from Kenya trip
Muriel Mcclendon (Chicago State University), Sarah Bliese (Hamline College), and Albert Vargas (UND) spent two weeks in Eldoret and Nairobi as part of the Analytical Chemistry REU program. Muriel worked on a quantitative paper test card for antibiotics and gave a presentation at Eldoret University, Sarah helped repair an HPLC and performed system suitability testing for amoxycillin analysis, and Albert worked on a test card for air pollutants and generally helped out.…
CUNY PAD team wins $25,000 Zahn Social Impact award
Congratulations to the VeriPAD team, which won the $25,000 social impact prize at CUNY's Zahn Innovation Center Business Plan competition. This team took the 12-lane PAD and developed a mobile phone application to help interpret the PAD results. Da Wi Shin and Bishoy Ghopal will participate in the Zahn Center's summer accelerator…
PAD patent issued
US Patent 9,354,181, Analytical devices for detection of low-quality pharmaceuticals, was issued May 31, 2016, to Toni Barstis, Patrick Flynn, and Marya Lieberman.
Toni, Pat, and Marya are grateful to Allan Fanucci at Winstrom & Strawn LLP, who acted for us and provided most valuable guidance through the patent maze, and to Karen Deak at Notre Dame who helped us understand the process. …
VWR supports PAD project
Prof. Lieberman is very pleased to report that she has received financial backing from VWR International, a global laboratory supplier and distributor of chemicals, consumables, equipment, and instruments. Through their relationship with Notre Dame, VWR is providing Prof. Lieberman with $10,000 per year of chemicals and consumables for the lab, which will support efforts to identify fake medications in Kenya and other countries in East Africa. A big thank you to VWR for their interest in and support of this important project.…