Funding Projects
The Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines promotes or initiates projects to optimize the quality of medicinal products, for example in the form of diploma and doctoral theses. Cooperation with universities, scientific societies and other institutions interested in promoting drug quality is also sought.
If you would like to submit an application for funding please contact us.
Note our Application Guidance for Funding.
August 24, 2023
Detection of unknown impurities in medicinal products
Goal of the project „SFC-based purity method development for the enantioselective separation of mepromazine and dapoxetine and their impurities“, is the detection of known and also unknown impurities in medicinal products. Our foundation decided to support this research activity due to its significant practical relevance. Initiator and supervisor of this research project which included two diploma theses is Professor Dr. Ulrike Garscha, Institute of Pharmacy at the University of Greifswald.
Supercritical Fluid Chromatography should be used in this funding project to develop a procedure fully validated according to EMA guidelines which subsequently can be applied for analyses of marketed medicinal products. The detection and identification of unknown and unexpected impurities in medicinal products containing chiral active ingredients is of great practical relevance to improve drug quality on the market.
August 2, 2023
Quality Requirements for Nanomedicines: Filling the Gaps
Nanotechnology is considered to be one of the key technologies for innovative medicines that can be used to overcome previously unsolved or unsatisfactorily resolved therapeutic challenges
The essential goal of this project, funded by the Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines (FFQM), is to identify and, where possible, close methodological gaps in the characterization of nanomedicines and to provide proper data analysis to support quality requirements for nanomedicines. The project is designed and conducted by Dr. Ines Nikolic, postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Gerrit Borchard at the University of Geneva, and in collaboration with Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials (EMPA) Science and Technology and University of Belgrade – Faculty of Pharmacy.
The Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines is waiting with great interest for the first results of this important research project.
June 29, 2023
Funding project: Detection of unexpected impurities in finished medicinal products
The Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines is now funding a total of four experimental study projects. Today we would like to briefly introduce the first one. This is focused on the analysis of possible contaminations of active pharmaceutical ingredients using losartan as an example. The occurrence of unexpected impurities in finished drug products – e.g., in valsartan preparations in 2018 – had elucidated how important the development of sophisticated analytical procedures is when creating impurity profiles.
Professor Dr. Oliver Scherf-Clavel is responsible for this project. Together with other scientists he had previously examined various sartans for nitrosamine impurities using a high-resolution chromatographic system (QqTOF-LC/MS). They were able to discover unexpected contaminations that could not be detected with the common methods (e.g., those suggested by the pharmacopoeia).
The research project supported by our foundation now aims to develop a general procedure for the „untargeted“ analysis of active drug ingredients in order to be able to discover unknown – and above all unexpected – impurities. This project is of great practical relevance for drug therapy as drug safety finally ensures patient safety.
Professor Oliver Scherf-Clavel was the award winner of the FFQM/DPhG 2021 „Quality of Medicines Award“ during his time as a junior professor at the Julius-Maximilians-University in Würzburg. This award recognized his research work on the contamination of valsartan and other sartans. Scherf-Clavel was recently appointed to the W2 professorship for „Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacotherapy“ at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.
