Director-at-Large Robert E. Brackett, senior vice president and chief science and regulatory officer of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), Washington, DC, USA. Prior to coming to GMA, Brackett was director at the U.S Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, where he provided executive leadership to the Center’s development and implementation of programs and policies relative to the composition, quality, safety, and labeling of foods, food and color additives, dietary supplements, and cosmetics.

Director-at-Large James M. Harnly, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Beltsville, Maryland, USA. Harnly is a research leader in the Food Composition and Methods Development Laboratory, Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, Agricultural Research Service, at USDA. Harnly is a recognized expert in the field of analytical chemistry and instrumentation, and has over 30 years of professional experience with industry and the government. In the last 8 years, his research has shifted to metal speciation, the development of methods for free amino acids, profiling methods for phenolic compounds, and chemometric methods for pattern recognition of chemical fingerprints.

Director Hilde Skaar Norli, Nordic Committee on Food Analysis (NMKL), Oslo, Norway. At NMKL, she is responsible for the management of the day-to-day operations of the committee’s activities. One of Norli’s main focus as a member of the AOAC Board of Directors is to continue to increase AOAC’s international presence. “I would like to see AOAC play a key role in the international arena by providing validated methods, guidelines, and scientifically based recommendations that are relevant to the analytical communities,” she said.

The next meeting of the AOAC Board of Directors is on December 8-9, 2008, at AOAC headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. Full coverage of the new Board of Directors will be included in the November/December issue of Inside Laboratory Management.

As part of the contract renewal, AOAC will add three new tasks to its work, and will: Extend Working Groups. Three working groups will be maintained for Yersinia pestis, environmental factors, and the assay, so that unresolved issues can be addressed in the most efficient manner. In addition, a new working group, including first responders, will be established for the purpose of planning a town hall-style meeting based on stakeholder input.

Increase Broad Communications. AOAC will expand SPADA to include more first responders and end-users, as well as more representatives from the public health community.

Convene an Expert Review Panel. AOAC will convene an expert review panel to examine the internal testing data collected by the assay developers and to select the best candidate assay(s) to undergo the pilot single-laboratory evaluation and multicenter validation.

The list, being developed under a new contract with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), now totals over 75 ingredients. An AOAC Presidential Task Force had previously agreed to beta-carotene, black cohosh, chondroitin, Co Q10, and many others, and from among the top ranked ingredients, some two dozen methods specific to these ingredients have been evaluated within the collaborative study process of the AOAC Official Methods program.

With the renewed contract between NIH and AOAC to determine the best methods for development and validation, new ingredients will be considered for ranking by a subgroup of the Task Force to meet at the AOAC Annual Meeting on Sunday, September 21, 2008, in Dallas, Texas.

Dietary supplement ingredients are ranked in order of need for a validated method, and source of funding is a major driving factor in decisions. Other criteria for ranking ingredients include the relative market share of the ingredient, the general availability of methods from which to select a method, any NIH clinical trials planned or underway requiring a method to characterize the material used in the trial, and any ingredient safety concerns. All ranking factors will be determined and justified by the AOAC Presidential Task Force on Dietary Supplements, and factors and assigned weight may change based on changing needs determined by its members.

AOAC welcomes recommendations of ingredients from the dietary supplement industry, government, and academia. Interested parties are invited to submit their recommendations, with a brief justification/need statement as to why these ingredients should be considered by September 15. Visit the AOAC website at http://www.aoac.org/dietsupp6/Dietary-Supplement-web-site/ingred_call.htm to find the current list of prioritized ingredients, along with a few suggested ingredients that have justifications/need statements that can serve as examples for other write-ups.

For more information, or to submit your suggested ings, e-mail Bob Rathbone, Senior Director of Publications and Method Validation Programs, at rrathbone@aoac.org.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration acting as the officiating body, has renewed its contract with AOAC to determine the best methods for turmeric, black cohosh, and vitamins B6 and B12. Under a previous NIH contract, AOAC had assembled a network of experts to identify the best methods for development and validation of some 15 dietary supplement ingredients. AOAC will now engage this same network of experts to study these additional ingredients of interest.

As part of the new contract, AOAC is issuing an urgent call for validated methods for:

• turmeric (for curcuminoids)
• black cohosh (for phenolic acids and glycosides)
• vitamin B6
• vitamin B12

Turmeric, black cohosh, and vitamins B6 and B12 had been prioritized for study by the AOAC Presidential Task Force on Dietary Supplements’ Ingredients Ranking Subgroup because of the lack of validated methods for both their raw materials and finished products for dietary supplements. Dietary supplement ingredients are ranked in order of priority for methods validation, and source of funding is a major driving factor in decisions. Earlier studies have included method development on beta-carotene, chondroitin, CoQ10, ginkgo, ginseng, SAMe, saw palmetto, lycopene, and others.

AOAC welcomes methods from the dietary supplements industry, government, and academia. Please send the reference, the paper itself, or electronic copy of the method, as well as any available validation data, and please indicate whether reference standards are available and their source.

Interested parties are invited to submit methods by November 1, 2008. For more information, or to submit your methods, contact Bob Rathbone, Senior Director of Publications & Method Validation, at rrathbone@aoac.org".

Already scheduled to attend the Threat Detection Technologies Town Hall Meeting are more than 100 representatives from the CDC, DOD, FBI, DHS, and EPA; first responders from across the nation; Applied Biosystems and 20 other industries; representatives from food, water, and transportation organizations; and public health officials.

For additional information or to RSVP to the meeting, contact Krystyna McIver, Senior Director of Communications, AOAC INTERNATIONAL, Tel: +1-301-924-7077 ext. 111 or kmciver@aoac.org.

The company saw first-hand what AOAC does and does best—bring relevant and diverse groups of stakeholders together to come to consensus on fit-for-purpose methodology, a process important to their efforts with AOAC to validate globally accepted methodology for detection of various animal drug residues in tissues.

Indeed, AOAC has a proven track record (National Institutes of Health, Pepsi/Coke, Department of Homeland Security) of providing science-based solutions by bringing together key stakeholders to develop, evaluate, and validate consensus-based analytical methods.

For more information on the OA program, contact Dawn Frazier at dfrazier@aoac.org or Anita Mishra at amishra@aoac.org. To become a member of AOAC, visit http://www.aoac.org/membership/joinindividual.html

Delicious – and fresh—food will be served. The guest of honor, Harvey W. Wiley, will make a special appearance. Please join us!

Jeff Dahl, recipient of the 2008 Harvey W. Wiley Scholarship, graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2004 with a B.S. in Biochemistry. His senior project, with advisor Natalia Tretyakova, involved quantitation of biomarkers of DNA oxidiation by LC/MS/MS.

Dahl is continuing his education in the Ph.D. program in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Illinois College of Pharmacy. Under the direction of Richard B. van Breemen, winner of the 2008 Harvey W. Wiley Award, Dahl uses LC/MS/MS to measure levels of the lipid peroxidation biomarker 8-isoprostaglandin F2 alpha in healthy men taking lycopene, a natural antioxidant and red pigment responsible for the color of tomatoes. His next project will determine the bioavailability of lycopene using a plateau isotope enrichment method with LC/MS/MS measurement.

The Harvey W. Wiley Scholarship (US$1000) is awarded to an upper-level undergraduate or graduate student to encourage and assist study in the analytical sciences. A college chosen by the current year’s Harvey W. Wiley Award recipient makes the scholarship selection based on criteria established by the Association.

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