Friday, November 7, 2008

PharmaSecure seeking to foil drug counterfeiters

By Jim Kozubek, Special to Mass High Tech

Dartmouth College graduate Nathan Sigworth, 25, and N. Taylor Thompson, 23, a student of public health who is taking time off from the college, are preparing to take their startup into East Africa and Asia, areas of the world known to be flush with counterfeit pharmaceuticals. 

Lebanon, N.H.-based PharmaSecure Inc., now in talks with unnamed angel investors for $150,000 worth of startup money, wants to begin a six-month pilot project next month in developing countries to give people a system to verify the legitimacy of their prescription medications.

It comes at a time when a $39 billion annual black-market drug racket accounts for 11 percent of global pharmaceutical sales — a number projected to reach $75 billion in 2010, according to the Center for Medicines in the Public Interest, an industry research group. 

PharmaSecure says its work could bring threats or worse from racketeers who proffer the fakes, and it’s not disclosing the site of its trials. “There are reasons I am being so cryptic; security reasons,” Thompson said. “The how and the where are not things we can talk about.”

Using cell phones now ubiquitous in developing countries, PharmaSecure will enable prescription users to “verify instantly their medicine with a pathway of communication between the user and manufacturer.”

PharmaSecure said it will add no new technologies but rather make use of mobile devices in novel ways to give users a direct means for verification. Other companies have tinkered with cost-prohibitive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, bar codes and holograms, but such devices require a point-of-retail scanner.
RFID makers include Inpinj Inc.

of Washington and Alien Technologies Corp. of California; bar code makers include Zebra Technologies Corp. of Illinois; serialization code makers include Sys-Tech Solutions Inc. of New Jersey; and hologram makers include U.K.-based Smart Holograms Ltd. 

Robin Koh, a former director at MIT’s Auto-ID Lab, is now chief strategy officer at Woburn-based SupplyScape Corp., a company making an electronic backbone that can provide history, contents and supply chain information for each individual canister of medicine.

Koh said RFID is too expensive at 10 to 20 cents a canister, while barcodes are easy to forge. But serialization, a process of assigning a long number unreadable to the eye, could work, he said. “It’s harder to spoof a high number,” he said.

But serialization would still require a point-of-retail scanner. PharmaSecure wants to put a means of verification into the hands of users. It will not disclose the types of information tags it will use to do this.

C. Everett Koop, a former surgeon general, is an advisor to PharmaSecure. The company is in talks with telecom and pharmaceutical companies, which see fake drugs cutting profits by $50 billion a year, for a second, larger scale trial and could seek $500,000 to $1 million in investment in six months.
 

Jim Kozubek is a freelance writer in Portsmouth, N.H.