Pharmacies and drug companies have successfully tested the first British system to tackle the growing problem of pharmaceutical counterfeiting and fraud. It prevents pharmacists dispensing medicines that the manufacturer does not authenticate as genuine.
The trade in fake and illegally-diverted medicines is worth tens of billions of pounds a year worldwide and kills a significant but unknown number of people, according to the World Health Organisation. Most victims are in developing countries, but the industrialised world is suffering too.
Aegate, a specialist company set up by PA Consulting to fight pharmaceutical fraud, developed the new British system. Its three-month trial involved six drug manufacturers, which tagged 20,000 products with a unique identifying label - either a barcode or a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip.
The 44 pharmacies taking part scanned everything with a machine that could read barcodes and RFID tags. Each reading was transmitted via BT's broadband network for instant authentication if it matched details on a manufacturers' secure database.
Ian Rhodes, Aegate chief executive, said: "This pilot has shown that mass serialisation [package numbering] of medicines combined with a simple tagging process can greatly reduce both errors and illegal medicines before they are dispensed."
During the trial two batches of counterfeit medicine - Cialis and Reductil - were identified by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). But Mr Rhodes said that theft and the illegal diversion of drugs destined for other markets was probably a bigger problem in Britain and western Europe than the outright faking that plagued poorer countries.
For example, 25 per cent of GlaxoSmithKline's discounted Aids drugs bound for Africa never reached their intended destinations between June 2001 and July 2002, according to Aegate. Much was "laundered" for sale in the developed world. The number of counterfeiting cases being investigated by the US Food and Drug Administration has risen to about 20 a year since 2001 from about five a year during the 1990s. The FDA wants RFID tags to be in widespread use throughout the pharmaceutical industry by 2007, and it is promoting trials of technology similar to the Aegate system in the US.
The Aegate results will be presented this week to the Second Global Forum on Pharmaceutical Anticounterfeiting in Paris. Three delegates from Britain's Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency are expected to attend the conference. Ian Lancaster, the conference organiser, said: "The UK has had cases of counterfeiting in the past and there is no reason to think it will be immune in the future."
As well as preventing fraud, the system reduces the risk of prescribing mistakes. For example, it stops patients receiving drugs that have reached their expiry date or been recalled for safety reasons. Two recalls - of Vioxx and Lorazepam - took place during the trial and pharmacists received warnings as they scanned the items.
Following the success of the pilot, Aegate will work with its partners to develop the system for commercial use. It could be launched within the year or so, Mr Rhodes said. The cost of nationwide implementation would be "a relatively small number of millions of pounds - a tiny amount in comparison with the value of the pharmaceutical supply chain".
