Quality of Medicines Award 2026 for Prof. Dr. Dominique Lunter and Jonas Link, University of Tübingen

The Quality of Medicines Award 2026, presented jointly by the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG) and the Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines (FFQM), was awarded to Jonas Link and Professor Dominique Lunter of the Department of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biopharmaceutics at the University of Tübingen. The award recognized the study by the research group titled “.A pivotal, dermal, in-vivo bioequivalence study performed by confocal Raman spectroscopy (CRS)” (European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics 217 (2025) 114891) on the determination of dermal bioequivalence using confocal Raman spectroscopy (CRS).

This work describes, for the first time, a pivotal in vivo bioequivalence study demonstrating that CRS is suitable as a non-invasive, quantitative method for determining dermal bioequivalence while also providing the necessary discriminatory power to generate valid and robust data.

The study was conducted in accordance with the current EMA guideline “Quality and Equivalence of Topically Applied, Topically Acting Skin Products” (EMA, European Medicines Agency). The results provide evidence to establish a modern, patient-friendly, and resource-efficient alternative to the established tape-stripping method and to time-consuming clinical endpoint studies. A prerequisite is that the active ingredients are Raman-active. The EMA guideline advocates the use of the sample collection technique from the stratum corneum—tape stripping—instead of a costly and resource-intensive clinical endpoint study.

Professor Ulrich Jaehde, President of the DPhG, and Professor Henning Blume, founder and Chairman of the Board of the FFQM, congratulated Jonas Link at the award ceremony, which took place during this year’s DPhG Annual Meeting in Regensburg.