CIMIT enables acceleration of fluorescent drug-screening device

The Center for the Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT; Boston, MA) is helping to push Boston University (BU)'s PharmaCheck project—which is working to develop a fluorescent device for drug screening—to recognition. PharmaCheck, with the help of U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP; Rockville, MD) and the Saving Lives at Birth Consortium (Ottawa, ON, Canada), can detect counterfeit and sub-standard drugs for low-resource settings. In the coming months, the team will finalize initial product development and start field validation in Ghana with the Promoting the Quality of Medicines program of the USP Convention.

Counterfeit and substandard drug use represents an estimated $75 billion problem globally. Each year, millions of people are exposed to poor-quality medicines, contributing to over 100,000 preventable deaths. Under the direction of Dr. Muhammad Zaman, Biomedical Engineering associate professor at BU and the project's principal investigator, the PharmaCheck team developed a technology platform for a reliable, portable, low-cost system to detect sub-standard drugs. Proof-of-concept was shown in the lab, but the team recognized that help was needed to develop a viable, sustainable business plan.

Under the direction of Wolfgang Krull, a CIMIT Accelerator executive, the PharmaCheck project has completed a business plan, identified key product requirement specifications, selected a development vendor, and is completing the prototype that will be utilized for field testing.

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