Pharmaceutical Forensics

The need for identification of counterfeit pharmaceuticals is becoming increasingly important. The presentations in this Tuesday morning session will examine various techniques of analyzing counterfeit drugs and packaging.

The first presentation in the session will be delivered by Anthony Zook of Merck and Co., Inc., and is titled “Analysis of Suspected Counterfeit Drugs: Application of Emerging Analytical Methods.” Zook’s talk will discuss the use of direct analysis in real time (DART) mass spectrometry for rapid analysis of counterfeit pharmaceutical products.

Zook’s presentation will be followed by a talk delivered by Robert Brush of Ahura Scientific. The presentation, titled “Authentication of Pharmaceutical Products by Fieldable Raman Spectroscopy,” will cover the use of a portable Raman authentication system to detect counterfeit pharmaceutical products.

The next presentation, titled “Multivariate Analysis of ATR-FTIR Spectroscopic Data for the Forensic Examination of Pharmaceutical Labels,” will be presented by Mary Carrabba of Southern Oregon University. She will talk about the characterization and discrimination of paper-backed, pressure-sensitive adhesive labels as a means to identify counterfeit pharmaceutical packaging.

Mark Witkowski of the FDA Forensic Chemistry Center will discuss the various techniques used by the Forensic Chemistry Center’s Trace Examination Section to examine samples for trace evidence as part of pharmaceutical forensic cases. The title of his presentation is “Trace Examination Techniques and Their Use in Pharmaceutical Forensics.”

The final two presentations in the session will be delivered by Jean-Claude Wolff of GlaxoSmithKline. The first, titled “Comparison of LC/MS and Ion Mobility Spectrometry Combined with Mass Spectrometry for the Differentiation of Counterfeit Heptodin,” will discuss the use of ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) combined with mass spectrometry (MS) versus liquid chromatography (LC)–MS and LC–IMS-MS for the identification and differentiation of various counterfeit samples of an antihepatitis drug. His second presentation, the final one in the session, titled “Carbon, Magnesium, and Sulfur Isotope Ratio Measurements Combined with Trace Metal Profiling for Detection of Counterfeit Antiviral Drugs,” covers isotopic fingerprinting and trace metal profiling techniques used to identify a suspected counterfeit antiviral drug.