US government gets a fresh patent for falsified drug detector

The US government has been awarded another patent on its handheld CD-3+ device for detecting falsified medicines.

The device works by illuminating a medicine and its packaging at specific wavelengths of light and making comparisons between the suspect sample with data from an authentic medicine.

The new patent was filed back in 2017, when the FDA was starting field trials of the device in the detection of falsified and substandard antimalarial drugs in Ghana, which reinforced its potential for front-line screening device alongside other devices like the Global Pharma Health Fund's Minilab and Thermo Fisher's TruScan. There has however been little news on the development of the device since then.

The abstract of the patent appears below:

Device and method for detection of counterfeit pharmaceuticals

Abstract: A device (100) for measuring light transmission through a suspected counterfeit pharmaceutical tablet (102) includes a laser source (110) configured to emit a light transmission through the pharmaceutical tablet (102). A light detector (120) is included in the device (100) configured to receive the light transmission and measure an amount of light passed through the suspected counterfeit pharmaceutical tablet (102). The amount of light transmitted through the suspected counterfeit pharmaceutical tablet (102) is indicative of an authentic or counterfeit.

Patent No. 11,162,892