Pharmaceutical quality control
Active ingredient quantification, content uniformity testing, and rapid detection of counterfeit medicines and cosmetics containing banned substances.
The problem
Counterfeit and substandard medicines are a direct public health risk and, for distributors, a legal and reputational one. Reference testing by chromatography is accurate but requires a laboratory, reagents, trained staff and hours to days of turnaround. That makes wide screening at warehouses, pharmacies and border posts effectively impossible.
How we solve it
Raman allows screening directly through a blister pack or transparent packaging, without opening or destroying the sample. BIRALAB models match the measured spectrum against a library of active ingredient spectra and flag deviations in composition or content. Each screening result carries a confidence level and the anomalous spectral region; flagged samples are escalated to reference testing. The goal is to narrow down the number of samples requiring expensive analysis, not to replace the reference method.
A Raman screening result is indicative data, not a legal determination of medicine quality. Formal conclusions must be issued by the competent testing authority.
Results so far
This line of work is still at the research stage. The group has not yet published performance figures, so we deliberately state none here. Figures will be published with full acquisition conditions as soon as peer-reviewed results are available.
Case study
The first case study is being prepared with a partner organisation. It will be published once all parties agree and, where human data is involved, once ethics approval is in place.
Related publications
No data yet
No publications in this domain yet
Our publication list is fully up to date, but no work has been assigned to this domain yet. The line of research is in its capability-building and partnership stage; the first publication will appear here as soon as it exists.
Next step
Propose a research collaboration
For research groups and hospitals seeking joint research.