Three devices are developed, or in development, in the world to fight the production of counterfeit medicine.
Muhammad Zaman, Pakistani, a biomedical engineer at Boston University, has made a cheap handheld scanner called PharmaCheck to quickly identify fake medicine in villages, clinics, and hospitals. Users (who need only a few days’ training) dissolve samples inside a small beaker in the machine. The liquid then runs onto a microfluidic chip the size of a postage stamp, where it combines with a molecule designed to bind solely with the drug in question. Binding sets off a fluorescent probe, whose light can be analyzed with a cellphone camera. The process reveals how much of the drug is present and how quickly it dissolves, and takes 15 minutes or less. Zaman’s PharmaCheck prototype has already been successful in lab tests on oxytocin, a lifesaving drug given to women after childbirth to prevent hemorrhaging. Later this year, his team hopes to publish its findings and build several more devices for field tests.
Meanwhile, the FDA is ramping up deployment of its own handheld scanners, which detect changes in a drug’s ingredients and packaging to help determine its provenance. Called CD-3, the device shines ultraviolet to infrared light on an object as it captures an image. The user compares that image to one of a genuine sample. If the two don’t look the same, then they’re presumably made of different materials or ingredients. The FDA has about 30 CD-3 devices deployed at international mail facilities, where counterfeit drugs slip into the country, and more at other points of entry. While not as sophisticated as Zaman’s PharmaCheck – CD-3 can’t determine a pill’s dose or how it’s released in the body, – FDA officials say the device is great for screening lots of drugs. This spring, the agency signed an agreement with Corning to continue refining CD-3 for later large-scale manufacturing.
The FDA’s CD-3 scanner shows optical differences between genuine and fake drugs and packaging. Courtesy FDA
A group of chemists from St. Mary’s College in Indiana and Notre Dame has gotten into the detective game, too. Its convenient and still-unnamed product—a lab on a piece of paper the size of a business card—directly detects a drug’s ingredients. (Each paper can detect one type of drug.) Rub some crushed Tylenol or anti-malarial on it, for example, dip it in water, and the results are rendered in colors. Users then send a photo of the paper to an automatic Web service for a “real” or “fake” response. The team has applied for patents and is looking for a company to help commercialize its invention. Its goal is less than a dollar per test. And at that price, it’s potentially the cheapest system yet.
Full article on Popular Science