Paper Test Cards for Rapid Field Screening of MedicationsThursday, 18 September 2014 at 09:00 Add to Calendar ▼2014-09-18 09:00:002014-09-18 10:00:00Europe/LondonPaper Test Cards for Rapid Field Screening of MedicationsPoint-of-Care Diagnostics World Congress in San Diego, California, USASan Diego, California, USASELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com Serious problems with the quality of both human and animal medications have been found in most of the developing world. Although there is general agreement that removing low quality pharmaceuticals from the supply chain would be a good idea, there is no global program in place to monitor the quality of pharmaceuticals. Existing analytical methods for pharmaceuticals lack the combination of low cost, reliability, rapid turn-around, and scalability needed in low-resource settings. My research group has been trying to crack this problem by developing paper test cards to assay pharmaceutical dosage forms. The prototype test card incorporates a library of chemical tests that generates a chemical profile of active ingredients and excipients present in a pharmaceutical. We are now using the test cards at a project site in Kenya where we are attempting to find fake drugs using a random sampling process across 350 pharmacies in Western Kenya. In this talk, I will demo the test card, show how it performs with different types of substandard and falsified drugs, and discuss the manufacturing and image processing challenges of scaling up the test cards. |