Oh, I think we could have done much better with the UI display…
from the article:
repeats the process with two other similar-looking pills, also purporting to be Viagra (one is a generic pill, the other a fake), and their graphs look similar, but noticeably different,
Will it work to tell if your printer ink is ink or ORIGINAL BRAND NAME TM ink too? Not that I expected it to be able to determine if the active component was genuine before i click the link but this sounds like it is just detecting Pfizer viagra blue and coating rather than anything else. Presumable once there is a reason to counterfeit this as well the the real and counterfeit will show up as legit and the generic will be the odd one out.
This would be handy for identifying trademarked colors, but would it be useful for the vast majority of other pills? As the actual drug content of a pill can be minimal, I suspect that the same fillers, binders, disintegrants, and lubricants are common across a lot of drugs – so a generic aspirin would look like a generic antibiotic.
Pocket-size gadget
Most guys already have something in the vicinity of their pockets that can verify the effectiveness of Viagra.
Uh, none of those pills match the reference perfectly, both the generic and the counterfeit are off.
Also, the “fraud” is visibly larger and a different color. A good photograph would be a lot cheaper.
Big market for that in Arizona and Florida.
A good beginning. Should perhaps get a wider range, at least to near-IR cutoff of silicon sensor.
Could be with minimal modifications also used as a colorimeter, or with addition of a spark generator as a metal analyzer (by emission spectra). With a filter and a UV lamp it could also be used as fluorescence analyzer.
Possibly, with more modifications and added laser, it could also serve as a pocket Raman spectrometer.
is that a viagra tester in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
So am I the only one that noticed that the provided base line didn’t matched the fake far better than either of the real drugs. Also while spectroscopy is ideally a good method to detect a fake drug this instrument leaves much to be desired.
First you can’t take a spectra is a brightly lit room you need an optical seal to remove external light sources or all you will receive is a spectra of the room lights.
Second this kind of instrument needs monochrome light source. Complex organic molecules are fluorescent to identify them you have to sample them over a narrow band of light so you can identify and account for that fluorescence. Also it doesn’t say which wavelengths the spectra are taken over. Its clearly not an IR spectra since the machines spectra looks nothing like Viagra’s published spectra,
Third pills are 99% sucrose and very often have complex coatings. How can the machine as it is currently built read through these coating and minimize the signal of the sucrose background. Further most “good” counterfeits are produced in the same factories that the real products are only with far less of the drug inside. In fact have read a case study where an Indian factory producing antibiotics used crushed real pills to coat inter sucrose slugs to pass exactly these kinds of tests. You need to examine the whole pill to determine if it is real not just the coating.
Fourth how is this machine any better than existing methods such as a flow through elisa? They have been around for 20+ years they have a proven record of accuracy in detecting narcotics and cost <$.50 a test. You could easily develop a test for detecting Viagra for far less than the cost of one or two of these machines and then produce them in bulk.
Clearly a technology problem that we need to solve for the good of mankind.
Heey-oooo!!!
Still - pocket spectrometer could do all kinds of fun legit and not so legit things. Help anaylyze your weed or coke purity?
It is not uncommon for “fake” VIagra to containe random/inconsistent dosage of Sildenafil, so a test that just detects the presence of Sildenafil wouldn’t mean much.
Is this machine primarily looking for the short-wave IR spectra of authentic Viagra’s trademark blue coating? Perhaps it is rare for fakes to exactly match both the visible and IR spectra of the blue film coating?
harRUMph !!! why , i remember the day when one had to walk 15 miles , uphill both ways , in the snow , to get in line to use the prep lab so that one could submit one’s specimen of alleged spanish fly to the spectrometer operations team ; AND then one had to wait for some beginning cobol or fortran programmer printing out one digit to a page for reams and boxes of paper to finish before the results could be spooled and printed ~ spoiled , rotten { vague degenerate mumbling } ( and what about a pi cam with a diffraction grating ?? low powered laser diodes of assorted frequency are also extremely cheapo these days , ehy ? )
I’ve been working on a detection system using the nitrogen resonances in sildenafil (it’s got plenty of nitrogens). As as already been mentioned most counterfeits actually contain some active ingredient as the counterfeiters also want repeat sales. So it has to measure the amount. The excipient in the tablets is mainly cellulose.
I’ll be impressed when I can get a mass spectrometer and look at the chemicals inside the pill. I betcha I could tell which one didn’t match the shade of blue with my eyes much better than this device.
Perhaps ED is on the rise…or not.
I’ll be here all week, folks.
If your fake printer ink has the same spectra as the original brand name tm ink, then it would be just as good. Wouldn’t help you tell the fake from the original. But it will help you separate the good fakes from the bad ones.
Actually, I can see the difference in the colour on the video. So all you need is a real pill to compare against and eyeball it. Here’s what you do.
- buy two pills
- test one with your in-built biological testing device. If it is a fake, throw away the other pill and go back to step 1
- if it is real, keep the other as a sample to compare future purchases against
