Zaman’s counterfeit drug detector could save hundreds of thousands of lives

Hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths occur around the world each year because as much as half of medicines in developing countries is either counterfeit or significantly substandard. Procedures used to check their quality are largely inaccurate, as well as slow, expensive, and complicated. A team of Boston University biomedical engineers and public health researchers, led by Muhammad Zaman, a College of Engineering associate professor of biomedical engineering and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, has been working for the past four years on a low-cost, portable, fast, and accurate detector of counterfeit and substandard medicines.