Executive Summary : | The ‘drug quality’ or ‘drug stability’ refers to the stability of the pharmaceutical formulations, is actually an important parameter in assessing the effectiveness of a drug. The chemical composition and the physiochemical properties of the drugs may alter largely when they are exposed to non-desirable temperatures, humidity, pressure, UV-light, oxidizing or reducing gas environment etc. Maintaining these optimum conditions is thus very important to quantify the degradation of the drugs during their entire supply chain starting from their point of manufacture, during their storage in warehouses, distributors, shopkeeps, in between transports, until it is finally bought and consumed at the consumer end. The monitoring at each point of the supply chain is possible by designing a reliability management system consisting of several sensors, embedded electronics, data loggers, suitable algorithms, and using NFC or even android based communication. In this project, it is aimed to fabricate monitoring systems combining solution-processed/ printed sensors and printed interconnects onto a chip carrying the communication hardware. The low-cost multi-sensor platform thus produced can be seamlessly integrated to storage boxes, refrigerators in the warehouse/ supply chain and record the drug environment conditions in real time. Within the diversified portfolio of printed and flexible electronics, the printed sensors are demonstrating the story of the fastest growing commercial success. While, in developed countries substantial and concentrated research efforts on printed sensors are being carried out, at the national level, any matching exercise is lacking. Therefore, the aim of the present proposal is to build a strong research team combining the workgroup of the principal investigators at IISc, IITB and the industrial partner MTag to enable a solution-processed/ printed sensor platform fabricated at low temperatures and on flexible substrates. The MTag scientists will supply the necessary criterion/ performance benchmarks that each sensor element must possess, and help/ guide the researches at the university meet the performance and fabrication guidelines. On the other hand, the decade-old experience of the PI’s at IISc and IITB in printed electronics will be put into use to develop the solution-processed sensors. The response of the sensors will be stored in local memory and read using NFC technologies. The industrial partner MTag is working on reliability management of expensive and lifesaving drugs and has found a strong demand for such data logger in pharmaceutical industries when they are affordable enough. At the next step, the inexpensive data logger with printed sensors may also find applications in the food industry and smart appliances. The decisive aim of the present proposal is to provide a prototype of an efficient, reliable, robust multi-sensor platform on flexible substrates that are preferably fully printed or solution derived. |
