Grant: Alliance Grants

When we visit the pharmacy to fill a prescription, we take it for granted that the drugs there are safe and verified-but are we right? Substandard and falsified (i.e. fake) medicines are a growing problem around the world including in Canada, where a pharmacist in Ontario dispensed a fake heart drug to patients, who died. Loopholes in law and regulation let wrong-doers trade bad quality drugs, with little risk of punishment (that Ontario pharmacist is still practicing today). INTERPOL notes police reports of medicine crime are up ten-fold since 2000, sometimes causing hundreds of deaths. Sub-therapeutic antibiotic drugs for tuberculosis and other bacterial infections both cause treatment failure and can select antimicrobial resistance (AMR). A shortcoming of previous work is that the identification of a substandard medicine occurs after local medical professionals notice a problem with patient care. To truly improve patient outcomes, it is necessary and critical to identify these poor medicines before they are administered in clinics. However, laboratory-based protocols are expensive and the instrumentation is not widely available, particularly in remote Canadian locations and the global south. What is required is a portable, point-of-care technology that can be used to screen pharmaceuticals before their administration to patients. To this end, we previously adapted a field-portable Fourier Transform - Infra Red (FT-IR) spectrometer to quantify selected antibiotics. It was successfully deployed in Sierra Leone and Ghana in 2017. The limitation of the FT-IR approach is the complexity of the analyzed samples. Pharmaceuticals contain both active and inactive ingredients which show up in the IR spectrum. Thus, the instrument must be carefully calibrated for various relative concentrations of the drug and excipients. If a new excipient shows up in a field sample, a new calibration of the instrument must be made. The key NSE problem to be addressed in this proposed collaboration is to develop a field-portable method to differentiate the drug from the rest of the sample by developing a portable ion-mobility spectrometer with an atmospheric ionization source for pharmaceutical analysis.