The Consortium for Improving Medicine with Innovation & Technology www.cimit.org, (CIMIT) a non-profit consortium of leading hospitals, universities, and laboratories is working to improve patient care by accelerating healthcare innovation and commercialization. CIMIT has helped Boston University’s PharmaChk team to secure a $2 million grant from “Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development” a non-profit helping mothers worldwide.
PharmaChk is a device to detect counterfeit and substandard drugs. The grant funding will help advance development and commercialization efforts to demonstrate the impact of the technology at scale particularly for use in developing countries.
Poor quality medicines have significant detrimental side effects on global public health, but particularly in poorer developing geographies. Hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths occur each year due to substandard or counterfeit drugs but using current techniques to ensure drug quality are expensive, slow, and complicated.
Under the direction of Dr. Muhammad Zaman, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor at Boston University, the PharmaChk team is developing a user-friendly, accurate, cost effective and portable system to analyze substandard medicines by quantifying active pharmaceutical ingredients and the release kinetics.
Zaman reports, “”We have spent several years developing the technology in an academic setting and by working with CIMIT, our partners in Ghana, the US Pharmacopeia (USP), we have received funds to transition the technology out of the lab and into real world use.”
The device has attracted significant funding over the past two years from the USP Convention under the “Promoting the Quality of Medicine” program funded by USAID. USP has provided both financial and logistical support in Ghana through their Center for Pharmaceutical Quality Research Center.
PharmaChk also received additional funding from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation www.whcf.org, mentorship from CIMIT, and support from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance http://nciia.org.