Taking a fresh look at counterfeiting in pharma & medical devices – From root causes to current solutions
Julian Liew, senior communications manager, SICPA SA, looks at the rise of counterfeiting in medical devices and pharmaceutical packaging.
Imagine this: news and social media report that dozens of patients, especially children, have died after taking a trusted medication from your company. A few weeks later, lab results show the product to be a fake.
Counterfeiting is a growing threat for companies that bring to market medicines, medical devices and pharmaceutical packaging. The WHO estimates up to 8% of medical devices on the market are fakes, as are up to 30% of medicines.
If you are a decision-maker in operations, supply chain, purchasing and brand protection, you are already confronted by a plethora of technology choices. However, the true challenge lies not in technology, but elsewhere.
Tackling counterfeiting requires a holistic approach that addresses three business issues.
- Today’s pharmaceutical value chain is often global, complex and vulnerable to infiltration.
- E-commerce, low-cost technologies and the sheer volume of global trade today make it cheap and easy for counterfeiters to ape key steps in the life cycle of your products.
- Because fake drugs and medical devices can harm or kill, time is of the essence.
So what can you do to bring protection as close as possible to the medicine? Are your company’s anti-counterfeiting measures catching fakes before they reach patients? Do they enable your company and the authorities to take rapid legal countermeasures when you do find someone hijacking your brand identity to put fake pharma products on the market?
Join independent thought leaders from BlueSphere Health and PwC Strategy&, as well as in-house experts from Clariant, a leader in specialty chemicals, and SICPA, a global provider of material and digital security technologies, in the first of a two-part webinar series on 14 September 2017 at 14:30 CET/08:30 EDT.
To take a fresh look at the issue of counterfeiting in pharmaceuticals and medical devices, register for this webinar now.