Professor Marya Lieberman has been awarded a grant from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to monitor the quality of pharmaceuticals across western Kenya through the use of innovative diagnostic test cards developed in her laboratory. These inexpensive, point-of-need devices have been shown to detect falsified antibiotics, TB medications, and anti-malarial drugs. This work address a major need as the Kenyan Pharmacy and Poisons Board estimates as many as 30% of the medications available on the local market are substandard or falsified.
The USAID-funded project received earlier support from the Indiana Clinical and Translational Science Institute (Indiana CTSI) Core pilot grant program. The recent seed grant is a collaboration between the PI and an international partner organization, Chemists Without Borders. The goal is to detect falsified or substandard medicines in the developing world by leveraging unused capacity in undergraduate analytical labs in Indiana and other developed world locations. The Core services are used to 1) test pharmacopeia assays to recommend the most reliable and robust procedures to partners at 4 year colleges and at the new HPLC lab in Kenya; 2) develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) for partners to show system suitability on their instruments and 3) analyze suspicious pharmaceuticals (LC, LC-MS, and GC-MS) discovered through field screening with the paper test cards.
HPLC Lab in Kenya
Originally published by at ctsi.nd.edu on August 25, 2015.
