Project Updates
NSF awards funding for studying supply chains for illicit pharmaceuticals
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…
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
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…
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!
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WHO study estimates 1 out of 10 medical products in low- and middle-income countries is substandard or falsified
by Zoie Alexiou
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recently published an advocacy document in attempt to quantify the cost…
PADs on PBS Newshour
PBS Newshour for Dec. 14 included an 8 min segment on falsified and substandard medicines in…
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…
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…
Detect adulterated milk with a paper test card
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.
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…
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…
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.
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