Last week, Alexis Pellek of Pharmaceutical Technology wrote about a pilot project launched by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations to test a new system designed to battle counterfeit drugs (See the blog post.) The system involved using DataMatrix 2D barcodes, which enable pharmacists to test the legitimacy of each packet.

We spoke with Mark Beauchamp, European Marketing Manager of Citizens Systems Europe, a firm that specializes in barcode technology, to better understand how barcoding can help the pharmaceutical industry to clamp down on counterfeit drugs. Read more »

This week, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and
Associations (EFPIA) launched a two-month pilot project in Sweden designed to test a serialization and verification system in pharmacies that would fight counterfeit drugs. Read more »

Pharmaceutical brands face an increased threat online, according to a new report by the brand-protection firm MarkMonitor. The study, Brandjacking Index: Summer 2009, focused on six leading drug brands and examined these key areas of pharmaceutical brand abuse online: illicit pharmacies, listings on B2B exchange sites, and cybersquatting, or the abuse of a trademark within a domain name. Read more »

At a joint session of the PharmTech Conference and the 4^th Annual Manufacturing Execution System in Life-Sciences Congress earlier this month, during my opening remarks, I discussed FDA’s proposed budget increase of $166 million and 346 FTEs toward Medical Product Supply Chain Safety and Security Oversight. The globalization of manufacturing and supply of medical products has created unique and demanding challenges for industry and FDA alike. Yet, according to a recent Axendia study on QMS trends in Life-Sciences, only 34% of respondents reported view global quality data in real time. Read more »

Like the recent report on Microsoft Bing’s sponsored ads for online pharmacies, a new report released this week by Internet-pharmacy verification organization LegitScript and antispam firm KnujOn focuses on the legitimacy of online pharmacies advertising in sponsored links on Yahoo.com. Read more »

A new report shows that sponsored links on Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, led to illegal Internet pharmacies. Of the advertisements studied, 89.7% led to what the report calls “rogue” pharmacies that break federal and state laws, as well as Microsoft’s advertising policies in several ways, most notably by not requiring prescriptions for prescription drugs and for selling counterfeits. Read more »

A new report released by OpSec Security, a provider of anticounterfeiting and brand protection services, found an increased amount of illicit behavior in sales of bulk pharmaceuticals and prescription drugs over the Internet. Read more »

One of the International Criminal Police Organization’s (Interpol) six priority crime research areas is drugs and criminal organizations. As reported in the New York Times on July 20, the organization is working with an informal group of researchers and government officials in Africa, Asia, and the US to track counterfeit drugs that claim to treat malaria, a disease that takes nearly 1 million lives a year. Read more »

A new report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says that West Africa has “increasingly become the target of a range of counterfeit medications, including antibiotics, antiretroviral drugs and medicines to fight malaria and tuberculosis.”

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German authorities busted a counterfeit-drug ring yesterday selling fake Viagra (Pfizer, New York) via Internet pharmacy websites, according to an Agence France-Presse report. After a months-long investigation involving 60 customs officers, seven prosecutors and 25 tax investigators, raids in five cities produced 46,000 counterfeit Viagra tablets, frozen bank accounts in Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, France, and Turkey, four confiscated luxury vehicles, 15,000 euros ($21,000) in cash, and four people in police custody. Read more »