Pharmacist brings gamer mentality to a very serious mission

An experimental new video game is helping Robert Lodder, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s College of Pharmacy, uncover real-life adulterated, misbranded and counterfeit drugs. Lodder, who is the analytical chemist for the University of Kentucky’s drug-testing program that looks for impurities in injectable drugs, is hopeful that his game, called MANTIS, can identify which of the drugs they received should be prioritized for testing. "We get a million dollars of product a day coming in, so we can't look at all of those," he says. Lodder, who has also worked with video games for Homeland Security, created MANTIS with Heather Campbell, a pharmaceutical engineer. In the game, players begin by creating a drug manufacturing factory, choosing which chemical ingredients to use and how to set up production lines. Then they switch to first-player mode and make in-the-moment ethical decisions. "It's stuff like, am I going to clean all the piping or just do the door, because my boss wants me to move on to something else?" explains Lodder. Their decisions affect how much money players make — and the person who makes the most money, wins. Read FDA finalizes rule for Canadian drug importation After the players finish, Lodder's lab analyzes the videos, trying to see the top players who won the most money by cheating and how they did it—and if the real-life versions of the products they won with are also fraudulent. MANTIS is loaded with information Lodder has gathered from other sources, such as how much drugs are selling for and what compounds they're made of, but the real people playing it offer information about how others might game the system that technology can't replicate. "Robots don’t cheat, and if they do, they only do it the way you've programmed them to. The first time we played with real people, many players were cheating in ways we just hadn't anticipated," he says. Next, Lodder is working on getting the game approved as an experiment. As part of that plan, he's hoping to add in more real-world aspects to up the stakes, such as players putting up their own money to join and being eligible to win a large jackpot, and sending mock FDA agents down the aisles to look over player's shoulders in real time to try and catch cheaters. Here's a clip from the game: In the meantime, he's running tournaments as an independent lab project. Some products flagged from these tournaments did reflect real-life problems - in one diuretic, Lodder and his team tested the product, and found significant issues, pulled it from their hospitals shelves and filed a citizen's petition to the FDA to have it removed as well. He's hoping this might augment the current way of prioritizing which drugs to test, where he uses algorithms that include information such as if a product is a sole source product, warning letters from the FDA, and what would be most profitable to counterfeit. But he says the information that's feeding into those algorithms is by necessity old, so he feels like he's always behind. "You're always fighting last year's battle, in a way," says Lodder. "With the game, you can better adapt to current market conditions." Lodder and Campbell produced a paper based on their tests of the MANTIS product.

Pharmacist brings gamer mentality to a very serious mission

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