PharmaChk: Substandard and Counterfeit Medicines Rapid Detection and Screening Platform

The primary objective of this project is to develop a platform that comprehensively screens for substandard medicines, expand implementation from a central testing facility to regional and community health centers and create demand through stakeholder education workshops. This project is expected to impact quality of MCH medicines on the market. Existing methods of substandard drug detection are bulky, require technical expertise, time-consuming, qualitative, error-prone and do not measure drug release kinetics. In response, through previous SLAB seed funding, PharmaChk has been developed to be a user-friendly, accurate, and high-throughput device capable of quantitatively measuring active ingredient concentration and drug dissolution to quickly screen for spurious medicines. PharmaChk addresses existing shortcomings through quantitative, affordable luminescence and dissolution testing, allowing for highly specific measurements of drug release.