Georgia produces about 70 thousand tonnes of mandarins annually, 50% of which gets exported. Local fruit juice industry utilizes most of the mandarins left in the country to produce mandarin juice. However, the leftover mandarin pomace causes serious environmental issues as the piled up pomace waste leaches acidic decomposting products as well as essential oils into the environment. Mandarin pomace is a rich source of fine chemicals and the project will develop environmentally friendly technologies to extrat those chemicals from the waste.
The aim of this project is to apply an innovative approach to the study of the antioxidant / antibacterial properties of plant extracts used in folk medicine using structure-based fractionation, characterization by multi-instrumental methods and evaluation of activity against Gram-negative bacteria (E. coli and B. burgdorferi).
The aim of the current project was to develop, test, troubleshoot, and validate the portable drug analyzer (previously called AiD) Drug Hunter (www.drughunter.eu) suitable for roadside drug testing in oral fluid by non-chemists operators such as police officers. Drug Hunter combines two powerful techniques in one box: capillary electrophoresis (CE) and deep UV fluorescence detection. Drug Hunter Analyzer solves multiple technological gaps of immunoassay tests (high error rates, control strip failure, only qualitative results, detection of illegal drug classes), providing immediate quantitative results for each drug even in multidrug abuse cases.
The main project outcome was the thorough troubleshooting, testing, validation, and functionalities improvements of the Drug Hunter analyzer for the real operation conditions in cooperation with Estonian police. The main achievement was the development of a new oral fluid collection and treatment procedure that helped to resolve the issue, i.e. the lack of oral fluid due to the dry mouth effect. Another achievement is dedicated to the increased sensitivity of amphetamines and the overall analysis speed-up. The cut-off limits of Drug Hunter met the DRUID recommended cut-off limits. Based on the results of the validation, the methodology complies with the requirements of the European Medicine Agency (EMA) for bioanalytical method validation.
Drug Hunter is a pre-commercial scale detection apparatus for illegal drugs to a quality level and simple enough to be used in the field handled by various professionals (police, custom workers, prison guards, and various transport situations). Drug Analyzer analyzer is protected by patent.