The New Jersey Chapter of the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering recently named Mahesh Karwa, of Kearny, in the chemistry department at NJIT, and Ge Bai, of Newark, in the chemical engineering department, also at NJIT, among winners of the society's annual research competition. Karwa's work focused on purifying DNA. Bai showed possible problems associated with the current drug testing apparatus and procedure prescribed by the US Pharmacopeial Convention Inc (USP).

"I am very proud of our two winners," said Piero M. Armenante, PhD., distinguished professor of chemical engineering, director of the graduate program in pharmaceutical engineering and advisor to the society's student chapter. Bai and Karwa will compete in the society's national competition at its annual meeting next fall.

Karwa's research showed a faster, cheaper and easier way to purify DNA. "DNA must be free from other contaminants after isolating it from a source such as plant, bacteria or virus cells," he said.

The current method is often laborious and time consuming. If the extraction procedure could be incorporated onto a chip, then the laboratory based analysis could be simplified dramatically and transformed to a home diagnostic test kit. This small scale integration would cut costs from dollars to pennies and decrease analysis time from hours to seconds.

"My research can have a potential impact in the fields of rapid disease diagnostics, environmental testing and biological warfare detection," Karwa added.

Bai's work showed that there could be problems with USP's testing apparatus. He examined the equipment to measure the dissolution rate of solid dosage forms of drugs. In add
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Contact: Sheryl Weinstein
sheryl.m.weinstein@njit.edu
973-596-3436
New Jersey Institute of Technology
25-May-2005