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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Pathology of Negligence: Report on Batch J093
In the third week of September, 2011, a worker loaded white powders from drums and plastic bags into a mixing machine at Efonze Chemical Industries to produce Batch J093 of a drug called Isotab. It had been ordered by a cardiac clinic in Pakistan. One of the drums, labeled as pre-gelatinized starch, was probably filled with pyrimethamine. A batch of this antimalarial medicine had arrived in a moldy container earlier in the month and been transferred to a blue drum, the same type of drum used to hold starch. Perhaps no-one updated the label. In any case, over 20 Kg of pyrimethamine was somehow added to the batch of isosorbide mononitrate. Each heart pill that was pressed contained over 50 mg of this drug in addition to the intended active ingredient; patients who took the heart medicine would receive doses of 100-150 mg pyrimethamine per day. The recommended dose of pyrimethamine is just 25 mg per week. The consequences to hundreds of Pakistanis would be devastating.
Chemists Without Borders newsletter highlights "find the fakes" project
Three of the groups involved with the distributed pharmaceutical analysis lab (DPAL) are highlighted in the March 2016 newsletter for Chemists Without Borders.
SaltPAD external validation now in print
Special issue of Nanobiomedicine, edited by Barbara Smith of ASU, Meeting the Needs of Health Care across the Globe
Lab is now well EQUIPped
In order to determine whether a population is receiving enough iodine in their food, it's necessary to measure this micronutrient in urine samples. The analysis is very difficult because the concentrations are so low--between 10 and 500 parts per billion.
The Centers for Disease Control…
Nick, you were brilliant! $1500 prize in 3MT
Nicholas Myers came in 2nd place in the 3MT Thesis Summary event this evening, winning an enormous sum (photo coming tomorrow).
Nick has 3 minutes to be brilliant
Finals for the 3MT are Wednesday March 14, 4-6 pm, in the Jordan Auditorium. Come cheer for the presenters!
Short course on medicine quality at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
July 4-9, 2016. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
The short course is aimed at personnel who are involved and/or interested in medical product quality (medicines, diagnostics, vaccines). The course will be aimed at global public health issues, and those found in low-, middle-…
PADs make the Kenyan News
Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016: The Nation (one of the main Kenyan newspapers) published an article about our effort to detect low quality drugs in Eldoret, Kenya.
…
ND undergraduates participate in PAD research in Eldoret
Notre Dame juniors Tabitha Healy and Paulina Eberts are assisting with the repair of four HPLC systems that will be donated to labs in Africa. They accompanied Prof. Lieberman to Eldoret over the winter break.
Tabitha and Paulina working with one of the Waters HPLC instruments in the drug analysis…
Nicholas Myers wins 2015 Pacifichem Poster Award
3645 poster abstracts were submitted for Pacifichem 2015, 350 were nominated for the poster competition, and 54 of those won. Congratulations to Nick for his excellent work and ability to WOW the judges!
Nicholas Thurin wins poster award at PINDU
Nicholas Thurin, a senior at Penn High School, presented a poster on his air pollution test card at the Dec. 5, 2015 Purdue-Indiana-Notre Dame University inorganic chemistry conference. Nick generated the nitrogen oxides using Ira Remsen's method*, diluted the gases to part-per-million levels, then designed…
Maven of Millifluidics
Emily Mediate named 2016 Rhodes Scholar
Emily Mediate worked on the PAD project in 2012, organizing and testing some of the Kenyan antibiotic samples and helping Nick get the saltPAD off the ground. She later did research in Uganda focusing on the effectiveness of AIDs interventions.
The Rhodes Scholarship supports students in…
PAD workshop at Future Trends in Latin American Healthcare conference
A hundred policy makers, regulatory officials, and health care providers from Central and South America experiment with a new technology for detecting falsified medications. Paper analytical devices (PADs) are employed to determine which sample of a tuberculosis medication has been adulterated with…
2015 US-AID (DIV) awards announced
AMPATH received support for a program to provide incentives for Kenyan patients to enroll for health insurance; the PAD project will be supported to implement a field screening program working with the pharmacovigilence team at Moi Hospital. Congratulations to all!
The US Agency for international…
PADs at Hospital Pharmacist Association of Kenya Annual meeting
Bad medicine in Bangaladesh
BBC story and video about use of test cards in Kenya
CePAT provides facilities for pharmacopeia testing and training in Ghana
Last Thursday May 21, I had the opportunity to visit the Center for Pharmaceutical Advancement and Training in Accra, Ghana. This lab facility was established by USP in May of 2013, so it's just two years old. The director is…
BBC shows PADs in use at Moi Hospital
The short segment aired Saturday May 23 on BBC International's HealthCheck program as part of a larger theme of finding and fighting poor quality medications; I'll post a link as soon as I get it from the producers.
Here Zoe Flood is shooting video of some of the pharmacy students using…