Identification of pharmaceutical products using Handheld NIR and Raman spectrophotometers.

Abstract:
Context: 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 vibrational spectroscopy have been developed for rapid and on-field drug analysis.
Objective: The objective of this work was to evaluate the identification performances of handheld near infrared (NIR) and Raman systems.
Methods: The formulations of artemether-lumefantrine were used in tablet dosage forms. In order to perform a critical comparison, the analytical performances of the two analytical systems were compared statistically using the method of data-driven soft independent modeling of class analogy (DD-SIMCA).
Results: 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, because of the strong influence of the auto-fluorescence phenomenon, the signal of highly-dosed active pharmaceutical ingredient (lumefantrine) masking the signal of low-dose and weak Raman scatterers API (e.g. artemether).
Conclusion: Hence, Raman systems are less effective for authentication purposes but are interesting in the context of falsification because they allow a visual interpretation of the spectral signature (presence or absence of API).