Session: Undergraduate Research Posters: Analytical Chemistry:

Doxycycline is a prescription antibiotic used to combat various infections and diseases. In areas such as Africa, it is most commonly prescribed to protect against malaria. Currently, the manufacture and sale of counterfeit pharmaceutical drugs is a growing issue, especially in developing countries. Through a coalition with the University of Notre Dame’s Distributed Pharmaceutical Analysis Laboratory, this study was conducted to investigate the quality and quantity of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) within doxycycline capsules sourced from Kenya and Papua New Guinea using HPLC-UV. Despite many of the samples being within acceptable API limits, the physical observations of a pill’s contents varied greatly. This observation led us to investigate excipient formulations via attenuated total reflection Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) and Raman spectroscopic methods as a potential for an additional influencer of doxycycline degradation.

Karin Maher

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