Multiphase evaluation of portable medicines quality screening devices

Funding

This work has been co-funded by the Regional Malaria and other Communicable Disease Threats Trust Fund, which has been co-financed by the Government of Australia (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade); the Government of Canada (Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development); and the Government of the United Kingdom (Department for International Development). The grant (RETA 8763) was managed by the Asian Development Bank (https:// www.adb.org/) and awarded to PNN. Additional support was provided by Wellcome Trust Grant N˚ 202935/Z/16/Z (https://wellcome.org/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.This work has been a large multicountry effort, larger than we anticipated, and we are extremely grateful to the many who have made it possible. We are very grateful to the Government of the Lao PDR for their support, especially the Bureau of Food and Drug Inspection, the Food and Drug Department, the Food and Drug Quality Control Centre, and the University of Health Sciences. We are very grateful to the Directors and staff of Mahosot Hospital for allowing us to install the Evaluation Pharmacy in the hospital grounds and to Assoc. Prof Mayfong Mayxay for his advice. We are grateful for the support of the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory and the Centre for Tropical Medicine & Global Health of Oxford University who invested in the administration of the project and to the members of the Substandard and Falsified Medical Products of the World Health Organization, Geneva. We are very grateful for the discussions with the manufacturers and developers of the devices and to the members of the United States Pharmacopeial Convention Expert Panel on “Review of Surveillance and Screening Technologies for the Quality Assurance of Medicines.” We are very grateful for the technical assistance of Douglas Ball, Sonalini Khetrapal, and Susann Roth.