Some success stories
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For all these reservations, speakers at the meeting had positive experiences to tell about how cost-effective security systems can keep counterfeits out of the legal supply chain.
In the case of Italy, efforts started in the late 1990s, not as a response to counterfeiting but due to problems with drug diversion. This led to a regulation introducing a track-and-trace system for medicines. Italy also set up IMPACT Italia, a national body modelled on the WHO's International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce. Since track-and-trace was implemented, there have been no cases of counterfeit drugs in Italy's legal supply chain, Di Giorgio noted.
Belgium, explained Dirk Broeckx, Secretary General of the local pharmacists' association, APB, has the added incentive of the Pharmaceutical Practice Law of 1885, which gave pharmacists no-fault responsibility for every product they dispensed. In 1952 the APB launched a Medicines Control Laboratory, which conducts around 180 recalls a year.
These protections were consolidated by the unique barcode introduced on medicines packs by the national health insurance agency, INAMI, in 2004, followed by a drug authentication service launched by the APB in 2006.
Collaborating with Aegate on the system was a "logical extension of all the things we had done before", he noted. Moreover, the APB's proactive approach gave it an opportunity to steer the system to the benefit of pharmacists.
All products without or without serialisation are scanned, and the system can be used to convey pharmacovigilance data or expiry warnings rapidly to pharmacists. This emphasis on patient safety is an important point for the Aegate system in markets where pharmacists may be slow to acknowledge a problem with counterfeiting.
Providing authentication as a system with professional, patient and business management benefits beyond the critical remit of keeping counterfeits at bay, engages effectively with what Gary Noon, chief executive officer of Aegate, called the "last line of defence" before the pack reaches the patient.
If pharmacists are not on board, then the need for more complex and costly solutions extending back through the supply chain becomes all the more acute.