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PharmaSecure India, one of the leading companies that provide anti-counterfeiting product-identifier codes to pharmaceutical companies, has bagged another contract for rolling out SMS-based authentication service to 30 million packages for a top manufacturer having multiple facilities in India.
Last year, the company sold 70 million codes to Unichem to be printed on its drug packaging. The two Unichem drugs that were marked with PharmaSecure codes were anti-anxiety treatment Trika and the anti-hypertensive Losar-H.
Mr Nathan Sigworth, CEO, PharmaSecure, said SMS-based tracking facility to protect the genuineness of drugs is fast catching up in India after steps taken by the Government to eliminate counterfeiting of drugs.
The Drug Consultative Committee set up by the Government has approved unique identifier for all domestic drugs so that they can be verified by consumers through SMS (short messaging service).
Patients can send an SMS of the code printed on a specific drug to 9901099010 and they will receive a response on all the details of the drug, said Mr Kishore Kar, Director, PharmaSecure.
High cost?
“A few manufacturers have expressed apprehensions that implementation of such a system could lead to high cost as it requires major changes at their manufacturing units. But the modular solutions created by us could be implemented in phases,” he added.
The baseline solution is inexpensive and can be implemented in few days with minimal changes to the current processes. This can be scaled up to full track and trace in phases as and when the manufacturer decides, he said.
The Government recently made it mandatory for all export drugs to have serialisation with Track and Trace capability. The notification to this effect has been issued by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT).
Recently, fake medicines were sold in some African countries as ‘made in India'. The new initiative by the Government to serialise every pack of medicine will go a long way in preventing such occurrences, said Mr Kar.
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