With substandard and counterfeit medicines a dangerous and growing problem in the developing world and elsewhere, identifying new technologies to detect such drugs is an urgent matter. In a new study published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, scientists from the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) evaluated a handheld Raman device’s potential to detect counterfeit and substandard medicines. The device, called TruScan®, is currently used to test Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) and finished pharmaceutical products, and it was evaluated for its ability to differentiate among drug products with different APIs, different brands of the same API, and drug products having the same API but of different strengths, with focus on the specificity and precision of the testing. While TruScan could be used successfully in the initial screening for authentication of the identity of certain targeted medicines, it may not be reliable enough to establish whether the medicines are substandard or not. The print version of the study appears in the journal’s February issue.
