Comparing the qualitative performances of handheld NIR and Raman spectrophotometers for the detection of falsified pharmaceutical products

Over the last decade, the growth of the global pharmaceutical market has led to an overall increase of substandard and falsified drugs especially on the African market (or emerging countries). Recently, several methods using handheld/portable vibrational spectroscopy have been developed for rapid and on-field drug analysis. The objective of this work was evaluate the performances of various NIR and Raman handheld spectrophotometers in specific brand identification of medicines through their primary packaging. Three groups of drug samples (artemether-lumefantrine, paracetamol, and ibuprofen) were used in tablet or capsule forms. In order to perform a critical comparison, the analytical performances of the two analytical systems was compared statistically using three methods: hierarchical clustering algorithm (HCA), data-driven soft independent modeling of class analogy (DD-SIMCA) and hit quality index (HQI). The overall results show good detection abilities for NIR systems compared to Raman systems based on Matthews’s correlation coefficients, generally close to one. Raman systems are less sensitive to the physical state of the samples than the NIR systems, it also suffers of the auto-fluorescence phenomenon and the signal of highly dosed active pharmaceutical ingredient (e.g. paracetamol or lumefantrine) may mask the signal of low-dosed and weaker Raman active compounds (e.g. artemether). Hence, Raman systems are less effective for specific product identification purposes but are interesting in the context of falsification because they allow a visual interpretation of the spectral signature (presence or absence of API).