Dr. Cathrin Hauk received the “Quality of Medicines Award” 2022

As part of the 2022 annual meeting of the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG) in Marburg, the »Quality of Medicines Award« was awarded for the second time. The prize is a joint award from the Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines (FFQM) and the DPhG.

This year’s award winner is Dr. Cathrin Hauk, University of Oxford/UK. Her dissertation »Investigations and identification options for inferior and counterfeit drugs to improve drug quality in low- and middle-income countries« was honored. The work was supervised by Prof. Dr. Lutz Heide, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

Cathrin Hauk has carried out several studies in Togo, DR Congo and Cameroon in order to expand the hitherto insufficient data on the prevalence of inferior and counterfeit medicines. Inter alia, she examined the quality of antibiotics and drugs for non-communicable diseases and she made a contribution to improving and expanding the methodology of drug quality studies in a subsequent project. The aim was to develop uniform criteria for distinguishing between inferior and counterfeit medicines. In anotherinvestigation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, she was also able to detect counterfeit chloroquine in Cameroon and the DR Congo.

Based on this work, Cathrin Hauk identified medicinal products that were on the market without any active ingredient, contained incorrect medicinal products or differed in appearance from the declared original. The results of their studies and investigations have been published in numerous publications.
So far, it is unclear whether such medicines could also find their way to Europe via routes that cannot be adequately controlled (e.g. via ordering on the Internet). Answering this question would be another important contribution to ensuring drug quality.

The certificate was given to Mrs. Dr. Hauk on September 16th by the board members of the FFQM, Prof. Dr. Dagmar Fischer and Prof. Dr. Henning Blume, presented. Prof. Fischer is President of the DPhG.
Cathrin Hauk has been working in Prof. Paul Newton’s working group at the University of Oxford, Center for Tropical Medicine & Global Health, since April of this year. There she coordinates a research project that deals with the origin and trade routes of counterfeit antibiotics and antimalarial drugs.