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.
