This CAREER award funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program in the Chemistry Division supports work by Professor Facundo Fernandez at the Georgia Institute of Technology to study and optimize the mechanisms of ion production in ambient ionization techniques for mass spectrometry (MS), with applications for rapid screening and fingerprinting of drugs in the open air. Screening will aim at detection of counterfeit and/or substandard drugs. Improved fundamental understanding of ambient ionization methods will enable development of better detection techniques to characterize different types of counterfeit drugs, and to combat and prevent this problem. More broadly, the work will support more rational application of ambient MS sampling techniques in a wide range of potential applications.
Professor Fernandez intends to promote increased awareness of fake drugs by guiding high school teachers in the development of field colorimetric tests and basic chemical separation experiments with pharmaceuticals, which will be used later by Hispanic high school students during "Summer Research Camps" at Georgia Tech. He will create teaching materials and will pursue a set of unconventional activities designed to increase the level of awareness regarding the existence of counterfeit drugs. Activities will include traveling seminars on "Case Stories on Drug Counterfeiting" for the medical community, a web-based information repository to distribute DESI chemical fingerprints, and a graduate-level course with hands-on analytical work with fake drugs. These activities and efforts in developing new laboratory-based screening methods will benefit from a local collaboration with experts from the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Center at Georgia Tech.
During the development of this award, we have studied and developed a new family of rapid chemical analysis tools that have made a big difference in the fight against falsified medicines. Specifically, we have been investigating how solid pharmaceutical tablets can efficiently be analyzed without the need for complex laboratory protocols, and in a very high throughput fashion. The new methods that we have developed and optimized allow both qualitative (i.e. what is in the sample?) and quantitative (i.e. how much of compound XXX is in the sample?) investigations. This new family of tools, based on mass spectrometry, has been used to analyze hundreds of samples in a single day at a much more reduced cost and in a much more environmentaly friendly way than before. It has also helped us in uncovering the true composition of fake pharmaceuticals and in some cases, their origins. Fake pharmaceuticals are a growing problem in both developing and developed countries, and chemical analysis is needed to investigate their composition. Sadly, many falsified medicines not only do not have the correct active ingredient, but they also contain other active ingredients, or chemicals that can be harmful, toxic or even deadly. Along these lines, our research has advanced our knowledge on how common fake pharmaceuticals are, and what they contain.
