US company to help check authenticity of drugs

PharmaSecure in talks with Indian firms to offer SMS-based services.

There is good news for consumers worried about the quality of drugs they buy from their neighbourhood medical store. PharmaSecure, a US based company, is in talks with Indian drug majors to implement a new, cost-effective, SMS-based technology that would allow consumers to check the authenticity of the drug — in a strip, tablet or a bottle — by directly getting in touch with the manufacturer.

The company has already bagged a major deal from Mumbai-based Unichem Laboratories to implement the technology for 70 million tablets of two of its flagship products. Unichem will soon extend it to more of its products.

“This technology can be implemented across multiple products and at different plants without any disruption. This will help strengthen our brand and differentiate our products from other brands”, said Prakash Mody, chairman and managing director of Unichem Laboratories.

“We are in discussions with most leading generic drug makers in the country and they are excited about the technology which offers direct, cheap and effective telecom-based interaction with the consumer. Four to five pilot projects are underway with a few drug majors and we hope to sign some major deals in the near future”, Nathan J Sigworth, chief executive of PharmaSecure told Business Standard. He termed it premature to reveal the names of the drug companies.

Currently, there’s a dearth of effective anti-counterfeiting measures and mechanisms to track authenticity of the products sold in the market. Most existing technologies like holograms (which can be copied), finger printing and radio frequency identification (RFID) used for anti-counterfeiting of drugs are much costlier, which make them non viable for cheap generic manufacturers, said Kishore Kar, director, PharmaSecure.

With over 25,000 brands, the Indian drug market is estimated to have an annual turnover of Rs 45,000 crore. Though the government claims the spurious drug market to be less than one per cent of the entire industry, a section of experts estimate that about 30 per cent of the drugs sold in the country are either spurious, adulterated or lack the potency claimed by the manufacturer. Under the technology, each drug strip or bottle will have a unique identification code and a phone number. If the customer sends an SMS mentioning the identification code, he will receive feedback from the company within a minute on whether the product is genuine or not.

The technology will cost only a few paise per strip and was affordable for manufacturers, said Sigworth.

The patent for the technology was pending and testing was underway in overseas markets too. India would be the first country to use this technology on a large scale, he added.