Substandard and Falsified Medicines (FIND)

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The presence of Substandard and Falsified (SF) medical products in countries, and their use by patients, impacts our ability to effectively tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We need to investigate this use both to understand the true scale of AMR as well as how much SF medicines may be contributing to the growing resistance.

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The Fleming Fund is supporting the Foundation of Innovative and New Diagnostics (FIND’s) work to increase the ability of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to detect and respond to SF medicines by evaluating the effectiveness of three field-based screening technologies, enabling LMICs to authenticate a medicine or establish whether it is SF without relying completely on central lab facilities which many LMICs do not have ready access to.

Partners:

FIND (Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics)

Timeline:

2.5 years (May 2018 - September 2020)

Value:

£1m

Priority countries:

Initial pilot in Laos

Objectives:

• to undertake a landscape analysis of what SF medicine detection technologies are currently being used and which are effective in LMIC settings
• to directly support the capability, ownership and sustainability of countries to tackle AMR
• to develop greater capability for detection that will feed into and support the work done by WHO (funded by Fleming Fund) to link up reporting on SF medicines globally through the Global Surveillance and Monitoring System (GSMS)
• to support roll out of a larger portfolio of pilots, to build country capability to use SF detection strategies in LMICs

Activities:

• survey methodology developed and landscape analysis undertaken
• establishment of a reference library for two commonly used antibiotics against which field-based screening technologies can be evaluated
• evaluation study of three field-based screening technologies; Raman, Near Infrared and Visual Technologies, to test their ability to effectively detect SF medical products in commonly used antibiotics
• evaluation of the capacity of in country staff to work with field-based screening technologies, to identify the difficulties they face in the use of the devices