Aegate News

Second successful Aegate pilot confirms potential to combat pharmaceutical fraud using a global system

23rd May 2006

Aegate, the healthcare authentication business, today reports a further breakthrough in the fight against pharmaceutical fraud, with the results of a major four-month pilot of fraud-busting technology in the USA. This is the second large-scale pilot carried out by the firm, which reports the results at today's Secure Pharma Conference in Philadelphia.

Results confirm the potential of Aegate's global system to prevent fraudulent medicines, including counterfeits, from being inadvertently dispensed to patients. Forty-two pharmacies across New York State took part in this exercise between November 2005 and March 2006.

Commenting on the results, Aegate's CEO, Gary Noon, said: "Having completed early testing in the UK in 2005, we repeated the exercise in the USA to confirm that differences between geographies can be overcome. This fully concludes Aegate's testing period and roll out of a commercial and globally scalable system will commence, initially in Europe, this summer."

In the US trial alone, more than 150,000 pharmaceutical product items were scanned at the point of dispensing. Added to the UK results, more than 330,000 items in total have been scanned and tested by Aegate's system. This included 23,000 items that were tagged with RFID, representing the largest trial of its kind in the industry.

When checked by the pharmacist using Aegate's custom-built scanner, the drug was authenticated if it matched details on a secure database, and rejected if not recognised.

In addition to securing the pharmacy, Aegate also tested the capability of the authentication process to address another source of risk: how to secure returned goods. While wholesalers and distributors wish to provide a good service to their pharmacies by accepting and reimbursing pharmacists for returned goods, distinguishing between genuine and substandard items is subject to a manual check. Today much of this product may be re-released into the market for sale. In this testing phase, Aegate added an additional authenticity check at the point of return and reliably demonstrated the potential the system could have to support this element of the supply chain.

The results of the pilot confirm that unique serialisation, either using barcodes or RFID, can be mass-deployed and that pharmacists and distributors are keen to gain the advantages of this technology. They also highlight opportunities to support the dispensing process and provide compelling evidence of the value of uniquely identifying medicines.