What is the name of your organization?
University of Notre Dame Paper Analytical Devices project (PAD project)
What is the name of your solution?
PADs
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Detect SF antibiotics with a paper test card and a cell phone
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
South Bend, IN, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Substandard or falsified pharmaceuticals impact 6.6 billion people who live in LMICs. A key factor our solution addresses is the need for speed. Many small medicine shops are turning over their stock of basic antibiotics on a monthly basis. That means you have to find the bad-quality products and get the word out to people within a week or two of the introduction of the new product. Nobody can do that right now.
PADs are an inexpensive screening tool for detection of suspicious antibiotics-products that contain the wrong type or quantity of ingredients. PADs are used with a phone app (the PADreader) and a database (VERIFY) that together track provenance, metadata, and test results from pharmaceutical samples across multiple sites. The VERIFY system can be used to share selected information with other VERIFY users, speeding regional and international cooperation on problem products. PADs detect suspicious antibiotics quickly, so regulatory labs, which have the authority to remove bad quality products from the market, can concentrate scarce HPLC resources on products that are likely to be bad quality.
What is your solution?
The PAD system has four components: 1). the PAD is a paper analytical device, a "lab on paper" that generates a color bar code based on the chemical components of the antibiotic dosage form. 2). the PADreader is a cell phone app that snaps a photo of the PAD and reads the test result. 3). VERIFY is a software system that tracks sample data and test results; it is integrated with the PADreader. 4). The distributed pharmaceutical analysis laboratory, or DPAL, is a consortium of colleges and universities that for the past 10 years has provided HPLC analysis capacity for samples from LMICs at very low cost.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
The PAD is designed for use by regulators, researchers, medical caregivers, vets, and pharmacists or medicine shop owners in LMICs. These are people who are motivated by the problem of SFPs, but face significant barriers to testing antibiotics--barriers of cost, usability, training, tracability, and access to confirmatory testing.
Cost: A site can easily obtain the materials needed to start screening antibiotics. PAD cards cost ~3 GBP each. The PADreader and VERIFY are free.
Usability: Preparing and testing a sample takes under 7 minutes; only the PAD card and water are required. PADs are the size of a playing card, light and easy to ship or carry. They will last at least 6 months at RT.
Training: PAD training takes 2-3 hours and can be done by video call, with additional office hours for user support.
Tracibility: Information about the sample and the PAD results are stored digitally and data is secured with the Bloxburg blockchain.
Confirmatory testing: If a site does not have capacity for compendial testing, the DPAL network can perform those tests. The site can track where their samples are and see the results in real time through the VERIFY system.