What if Banana Bags Came Ready to Use?

In the ER, even a few seconds matter. These IV bags can prevent Wernicke’s encephalopathy, a serious neurological condition that can lead to confusion, coma, or permanent brain damage. They are also used for patients experiencing severe dehydration, malnutrition, or prolonged vomiting.

In Dr. Zvi Loewy’s lab at Touro College of Pharmacy, researchers including Dr. David Braverman, Assistant Professor, Dr. Keith Veltri, Associate Professor and Ruginn Catarata, Research Associate are working on a simple question that can give overworked medical practitioners those vital few extra seconds: can banana bags be prepared ahead of time, safely and reliably, so nurses don’t have to mix them at the bedside?

Under Loewy’s guidance, second-year Touro College of Pharmacy student Joseymi Goris Rosaria is working alongside New York Medical College students Lydia Jackson and Natalie Tran to examine whether the contents of banana bags remain sterile and chemically stable when mixed in advance.

Right now, banana bags are typically prepared immediately in the emergency room, often by nurses under time pressure. The team’s goal is to determine whether pharmacists could instead prepare them in weekly batches, returning valuable time to clinicians and reducing the risk of compounding errors.

“If the compounds prove both sterile and shelf-stable,” said Goris, “pharmacists can mix instead of nurses.”

To measure whether the vitamins break down over time, the students are using high performance liquid chromatography, a technique that allows researchers to separate compounds and track their stability.

“It’s able to separate multiple compounds, and then you can use different wavelengths of light to see what compounds are there,” Jackson explained.

Different vitamins absorb light differently, allowing researchers to detect both concentration and degradation.

“Vitamin B6 might absorb at around 400 nanometers, while B12 is at 550,” Jackson said. “If it has degraded or broken down, the wavelength will change.”

Goris’s work focuses on tracking those changes through peaks on a graph—signals that indicate whether a compound is behaving normally.

“We look at the peaks, the areas under the curves, just to see if it would stay chemically stable,” she said.

For Goris, the project is her first research experience, and it connects closely to the path that brought her into pharmacy.

Originally interested in dentistry, she began working remotely at a call center for a dental office. Many of the calls involved patients struggling to understand their prescriptions or schedule refills.

“The calls I was getting were from patients requiring help with translations for their medications,” she said. “I’m from the Dominican Republic, and it made me feel closer to my community.”

That experience showed her how easily medication misunderstandings and errors can occur and how serious the consequences can be.

“Medication safety is such a big problem,” she said. “I realized I could have an impact.”

Banana bags are often administered to patients in intensive care, where precise dosing matters.

“If we give them the wrong concentration of one vitamin,” Goris said, “it can lead to brain damage.”

Preparing IV mixtures in advance, under sterile pharmacy conditions, could also reduce contamination risk compared with hurried bedside preparation.

Jackson, a second-year medical student at NYMC, was drawn to the project because of her background in chemistry and her interest in pharmacology.

“I was a chemistry major,” she said. “When Dr. Loewy sent a group email about a project using high performance chromatography, it sounded right up my alley.”

Before medical school, Jackson spent years as a dancer and choreographer, an experience that shaped her interest in medicine.

“As a dancer, you often get injured from overuse,” she said. “I had a lot of firsthand experience with the medical community.”

She noted that research is increasingly important for medical students, especially those preparing for residency, and that the project’s focus aligns with her long-term clinical interests.

“Pharmacology is a part of anesthesia,” Jackson said. “So this work fits really naturally with what I want to do.”