Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 May 3:2022:5335936.
doi: 10.1155/2022/5335936. eCollection 2022.

Detection of Falsified Antimalarial Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine and Dihydroartemisinin-Piperaquine Drugs Using a Low-Cost Handheld Near-Infrared Spectrometer

Moussa Yabré  1   2 , Abdoul Karim Sakira  2 , Moumouni Bandé  2 , Bertrand W F Goumbri  2 , Sandrine M Ouattara  2 , Souleymane Fofana  1 , Touridomon Issa Somé  2
Affiliations

Detection of Falsified Antimalarial Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine and Dihydroartemisinin-Piperaquine Drugs Using a Low-Cost Handheld Near-Infrared Spectrometer

Moussa Yabré et al. J Anal Methods Chem. .

Abstract

Falsified drugs are of serious concern to public health worldwide, particularly for developing countries where quality control of drugs is inefficient. In law enforcement against such fake medicines, there is a need to develop reliable, fast, and inexpensive screening methods. In this work, the ability of an innovative low-cost handheld near-infrared spectrometer to identify falsifications among two antimalarial fixed dose combination tablets, dihydroartemisinin/piperaquine and sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine, has been investigated. Analyzed samples were collected in Burkina Faso mainly in rural transborder areas that could be infiltrated by illicit drugs. A principal component analysis was applied on the acquired near-infrared spectra to identify trends, similarities, and differences between collected samples. This allowed to detect some samples of dihydroartemisinin/piperaquine and sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine which seemed to be falsified. These suspicious samples were semiquantitatively analyzed by thin-layer chromatography using Minalab® kits. Obtained results allowed to confirm the falsifications since the suspected samples did not contain any of the expected active pharmaceutical ingredients. The capacity of the low-cost near-infrared device to identify specifically a brand name of dihydroartemisinin/piperaquine or sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine has been also studied using soft independent modelling of class analogy (SIMCA) in the classical and data driven versions. The built models allowed a clear brand identification with 100% of both sensitivity and specificity in the studied cases. All these results demonstrate the potential of these low-cost near-infrared spectrometers to be used as first line screening tools, particularly in resource limited laboratories, for the detection of falsified antimalarial drugs.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Preprocessed mean spectra in the 1085–1601 nm range. (a) SP samples. (b) DP samples.
Figure 2
Figure 2
PC1-PC2 score plot of the preprocessed data of both SP and DP data.
Figure 3
Figure 3
PCA applied separately on SP and DP preprocessed data. (a) SP PC1-PC2 score plot. (b) DP PC1-PC2 score plot.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Data driven soft independent modelling of class analogy (DD-SIMCA) plots. (a) Maloxine® (two PCs, α = 10−6). (b) Duo-Cotecxin® (two PCs, α = 10−7).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. WHO member state mechanism on substandard/spurious/falsely-labelled/falsified/counterfeit (ssffc) medical products, 2015, https://www.who.int/medicines/regulation/ssffc/A70_23-en1.pdf?ua=1.
    1. Kovacs S., Hawes S. E., Maley S. N., Mosites E., Wong L., Stergachis A. Technologies for detecting falsified and substandard drugs in low and middle-income countries. PLoS One . 2014;9(3) doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090601.e90601 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bottoni P., Caroli S. Fake pharmaceuticals: a review of current analytical approaches. Microchemical Journal . 2019;149 doi: 10.1016/j.microc.2019.104053.104053 - DOI
    1. Dowell F. E., Maghirang E. B., Fernandez F. M., Newton P. N., Green M. D. Detecting counterfeit antimalarial tablets by near-infrared spectroscopy. Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis . 2008;48(3):1011–1014. doi: 10.1016/j.jpba.2008.06.024. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Sakira A. K., Ouattara M. S. M. J., Yabre M., Bande M., Some T. I. Contribution to the detection of poor quality sildenafil drugs in Burkina Faso using high-performance thin-layer chromatography. Journal of Analytical Methods in Chemistry . 2021;2021:9. doi: 10.1155/2021/4093859.4093859 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources