December 22, 2024
Congratulations, Julia Gabel
Julia Gabel has successfully completed her doctorate with the PhD thesis on the topic “Investigation of the Quality of Essential Medicines in African Countries and of Medicine Quality Screening Technologies for Use in Low-Resource Settings”. The Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines had supported her doctoral studies with a one-year scholarship. We would like to congratulate Julia Gabel for the “summa cum laude” assessment of her doctoral work.
The PhD thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Lutz Heide, Pharmaceutical Institute of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. Prof. Heide’s research program focuses on the problems with counterfeit drugs and the challenges of managing healthcare supply chains in low- and middle-income countries.
Julia Gabel’s PhD thesis investigated various issues, some of which are discussed in more detail below.
Information on the occurrence of substandard or counterfeit/falsified drug products in low- and middle-income countries is often imprecise and contradictory. In cooperation with a church-based pharmaceutical supply organization in Nigeria, the Faith-Based Central Medical Foundation, Julia Gabel investigated the quality of 13 essential drugs from various local sources. An important aim of these investigations was to support the local organization in ensuring the quality of the medications it purchases and supplies to Nigerian healthcare facilities. Particularly alarming results were found for dexamethasone tablets, with around 95% of the 22 samples tested not meeting the quality requirements of the pharmacopoeia. This finding was additionally confirmed by an independent laboratory. As a consequence, the Nigerian Medicines Regulatory Agency immediately ordered the withdrawal of all dexamethasone products objected by Julia Gabel’s tests from the market.
The studies again confirmed the significant difficulty of detecting poor-quality drugs or falsified products in resource-limited regions since many of the developing countries do not have a sufficient number of appropriately equipped drug testing laboratories. Thus, simple but efficient and cost-effective screening technologies are important. The development of such methods and their verification under real-life conditions was subject of several sub-projects of Julia Gabel’s thesis.
In this context the appropriateness of a low-cost NIR spectrometer was investigated in combination with currently used chemometric methods. The question was whether this might be a low-cost alternative for verifying the declared active ingredients in tablets. The results obtained confirmed that the methods developed by Julia Gabel can be used to detect falsified tablets containing no active ingredient at all, an active ingredient that did not correspond to the declaration or strongly deviating amounts. This indicates that the method is promising for drug quality screening in resource-limited regions.
