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…
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.
Three of the groups involved with the distributed pharmaceutical analysis lab (DPAL) are highlighted in the March 2016 newsletter for Chemists Without Borders.
Special issue of Nanobiomedicine, edited by Barbara Smith of ASU, Meeting the Needs of Health Care across the Globe
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…
Nicholas Myers came in 2nd place in the 3MT Thesis Summary event this evening, winning an enormous sum (photo coming tomorrow).
Finals for the 3MT are Wednesday March 14, 4-6 pm, in the Jordan Auditorium. Come cheer for the presenters!
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-…
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.
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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…
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, 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…