Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

P-26 Detection Of Counterfeit Antimalarial Drugs By Sers, Getahun Merga, P. Shepard, M. Trujillo, J. Camden

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Substandard antimalarial drugs are a major problem to the health of citizens in developing countries, and it is likely that the problem persists due to the lack of means to detect substandard drugs. Various colorimetric techniques have been implemented to determine if a drug contains the stated active ingredient or not, but vibrational spectroscopies such as NIR and Raman can be used to more reliably quantify the amount of active ingredient. The use of Raman, however, has been limited by the presence of significant sample fluorescence that interferes with detection of the SERS signals of the active ingredients. Thus, we …