Breaking Good

In recent years the proportion of counterfeit drugs, especially in some African countries, increased dramatically up to levels of 60-80%. International organisations therefore buy their medication in Europe or the US or need to send samples back to Europe/US for chemical analysis before they can be released. This causes several week delays and significant costs. Clients of local pharmacies don’t have this possibility and especially harming contaminations are a significant risk for them.

Project Team

Alois Mbutura

Alois is a Student studying Electrical Engineering in Nairobi and 3D printing enthusiast by inspiration. He is currently helping build commercial 3D low-cost printers from E-waste with his friends at AB3D, a Kenyan startup. He is also involved in the maternal newborn and child healthcare project that is locally developing medical devices in Kenya that meet medical standards at low cost at Fablab Nairobi. During his free time he enjoys everything linux, programming microcontrollers and teaching kids.

Amit Navindgi

Amit is a developer, tech enthusiast and a football fanatic. He is currently pursuing Masters in Computer Science at University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He likes to explore domains and has worked on projects in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Wireless Networks and Big Data analytics. He is passionate about developing open source solutions with real social impact. He also spends time tutoring high school students in Los Angeles for USA Computing Olympiad while enjoying the beaches of LA in his free time.

Ananya Cleetus

Ananya (@ananyacleetus) is an incoming Computer Science major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is interested in assistive technology, and developed a 3D printed robotic prosthetic hand for leprosy victims in India, which she presented at the 2014 White House Science Fair and World Maker Faire. In addition to her work with robotics, she is the founder of Magikstra (magikstra.com), a social network that helps high school students find mentors in universities and businesses.

Diop ElHadji Assane

Assane is a Pharmacist and is involved with colleagues of Dakar University in quality control of Pharmaceutical drugs on the Senegalese and west African market. He is doing now a PhD on Interactions between TB drugs and Plants, and try to develop reliable technics in this way. He participate on information’s support about immigration to Europe for people from west Africa and has a big interest on the validation of traditional medicines.

Emilie Reginato

Emilie is a lab technician and since 2012 at the University of Geneva working on CE. Her first mission with Pharmelp and the Geneva University was regarding the ECB Last Spring in Madagascar. Before she worked on multi-MS and NMR platform at NRC (Nestlé Research Center). She has done other missions with Greenpeace, Pronatura and Seasheperd in Eastern Europe and Switzerland. She is a sport addict and bike junkie.

Julie Schappler

Julie is pharmacist and holds a PhD from the University of Geneva. She is currently senior lecturer and also research associate in the group of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis. She heads the unit of capillary electrophoresis, which works on developing methods to improve analysis performance while reducing analysis time and cost. Applications range from small pharmaceutical compounds and their metabolites in biofluids, to biomolecules. A special focus is given to the development of strategies readily applicable to transitional countries to fight against counterfeit medicines and perform sub-standard drugs quality control.

Luc Henry

Luc Henry is the Managing Editor of European science magazine Technologist and a member of the Lift editorial team. He spent the past ten years exploring the life sciences in various places around Europe and was a regular contributor to The Conversation. He recently returned to Switzerland and co-founded the DIY biology initiative Hackuarium. Luc holds a PhD in chemical biology from the University of Oxford. He has a particular interest in cutting edge technologies and their impact on society.

Meghana Sharafudeen

4 days a week Meghana is an associate program officer working on global health, climate change, and food security at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. She is passionate about arts and education as instruments of change and is an insatiably curious wearer of many hats – lawyer, access to medicines specialist, project manager, communicator, artist, musician. Her other 3 days are spent on side projects, pottering around a house overflowing with plants and animals.

Monika Cichocka

Monika graduated in biomedical engineering at the University of Science and Technology in Cracow. She specialized in biomedical informatics. For two years she has been a researcher at the Medical College Jagiellonian University. She works with magnetic resonance – especially she is focused on spectroscopic examinations.

Roice Fulton

Roice is an infectious disease epidemiologist and analyst at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance in Geneva. He brings ten years of experience in the life science, public health, and education sectors – with past endeavors ranging from HIV technology research in Zambia, to disaster relief and wildfire fighting in the US, to the leadership of a small educational foundation in North Carolina. Drawing on extensive experience in fundraising and advocacy, Roice aims to engage the broader scientific and technical community in developing sustainable innovations that improve health outcomes.

Serge Rudaz

Serge studied pharmacy and obtained his PhD in 1997. He was promoted Associate Professor at the University of Geneva in 2012. He is research group leader and member of the management Board of the Swiss Centre for Applied Human Toxicology (SCAHT) Fundation. He is also vice-president of the Competence Center in Chemical and Toxicological Analysis (ccCTA). He published numerous scientific papers (>220). He is currently interested in toxicological analysis, including metabolism, as well as pharmaceutical and counterfeits medicines.

Sharada Prasanna Mohanty

SP Mohanty is a Grad student at IIIT-Hyderabad. An open source enthusiast and a machine learning freak, Mohanty has been associated with Google Summer of Code for the past 3 years. He has previously worked with the ROOT team at CERN, and is currently associated with CERN as a Visiting Scientist. He was the winner of the CERN Webfest in 2013 and the coordinator in 2014.He likes building cool stuff, taking awesome photographs, writing computer games, playing his old dusty guitar and composing silly songs.

Sophie Redford

Sophie is an experimental physicist working at CERN. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford for her work on the LHCb experiment at the LHC. Now she designs detectors for future linear colliders by simulating particle collisions and developing hardware prototypes. She enjoys data-driven analysis and finding the minimal solution to problems. In her free time Sophie likes to swim, bike and run. She loves hiking in the Lake District. The most challenging thing she ever did was a 5k open water swim.