USP announces research grants
The United States Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) announced $150,000 in grants to fund ongoing research in its 2012-2013 Global Fellowship program for early-career scientists.
“Advances in science and technology often arise from the work of young researchers attempting to find cutting-edge solutions to problems,” said Roger L. Williams, M.D., USP’s chief executive officer. “Through our fellowship program, USP seeks to support innovative thinking and approaches to global challenges associated with medicine and food quality.”
One of the three grants bears directly on work in the field of dietary supplements. Jose Napolitano, PhD, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a awarded a $50,000 grant for his work in the development of a n generation of 1H NMR fingerprints for the rapid analysis of pharmacopeial reference standards. Dr. Napolitano’s research involves the development of a method based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis of small organic molecules in a wide variety of materials, including pharmaceuticals, food ingredient, dietary supplement and botanicals. The basis of this approach is the use of 1H NMR spectroscopy and computer-aided spectral analysis to create 1H NMR “fingerprints” of substances of interest. 1H NMR allows for simultaneous evaluation of multiple components and can provide a large amount of structural information at the molecular level, making it a powerful approach for purity and stability studies. 1H NMR fingerprinting has broad potential for single instrument/measurement approaches to chemical identification and quantitation of complex materials such as food ingredients and botanicals.
The other two $50,000 grants pertained to drug research. One was awarded to Boston University PhD candidate Darash Desai, who is working on a microfluidic fluorescence system to help detect counterfeit drugs. The other grant went to Ting Wang, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, who is developing the scientific basis for the application of spectroscopic and chemometric methods to excipient identification and adulteration detection.
