Got Fakes?  Paper millifluidic devices for rapid field screening

of falsified and substandard antibiotics

Abstract:  Efforts to ensure that people have access to high quality medications are undercut by the widespread infiltration of falsified and substandard products.  These poor-quality products are predictably concentrated in countries that lack technological and regulatory infrastructure for monitoring the quality of medicines.  In 2011, my group began working on paper test cards that could help to solve this intractable problem.  I will present two case studies of paper millifluidic devices for qualitative and quantitative analysis of antibiotic samples.  Hands-on demonstrations will be included in the presentation. The qualitative test cards use a range of chemical color reactions which were commonly employed for quality analysis before they were displaced by commercial IR and NMR spectrometers.  I will describe a neural network image analysis program for "reading" the cards that shows good accuracy in internal validation tests. The quantitative test cards are based on a titrimetric USP method and are accurate enough to detect substandard pharmaceuticals.   Some of the take-home lessons from these diagnostic devices include the benefits of fast prototyping, the requirement to design for manufacture, and the need for frequent user feedback.  These test cards are currently being implemented in western Kenya at scales of thousands of tests and have helped to uncover many low-quality antibiotics; I'll discuss issues involved in scalability and integration of the test results into existing regulatory and policy mechanisms. 

~BME Faculty Host: Jackie Linnes~

***Coffee and juice will be provided at West Lafayette***