Fight against Counterfeits Expands

This week in Cotonou, Benin, Jacques Chirac, former president of the French Republic and now president of the Fondation Chirac, urged leaders of governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and industry to work together to fight falsified medicines around the world. Chirac spoke October 12 during The Cotonou Declaration, a call for policies and programs that will work “to eradicate the manufacturing, the traffic, and the illegal commerce of counterfeit medication.”

Arguing that existing laws and regulations must be strictly enforced or be established if they do not yet exist, Chirac pointed to the use of “on-the-field implementation of effective instruments against the traffic of counterfeit medication, with trained personnel and repressive systems adapted to its realities.”

Speakers at Pharmapack 2010 will be exploring the role packaging can play in anticounterfeiting. Opening the session “Track and Trace and Fighting Counterfeits” will be Jean-Marc Bobée, Directeur de la Stratégie Anti-Contrefaçon Industrielle, Sanofi-Aventis (France); and Professor Jean-Claude Chaumeil, Faculté de Pharmacie, Université René Descartes Paris V (France).

Technology providers will follow with potential solutions. Jean-Luc Lasne, Director, Laetus France, will speak about conforming to CIP 13 requirements using Data Matrix. Roland Meylan, Corporate Communications Manager, AlpVision SA (Switzerland), will present his firm’s approach in “Low-Cost, Effective Invisible Anticounterfeiting Solutions to Protect Primary and Secondary Packaging and Labels.”

Thomas Voelcker, Marketing & Sales Director, Schreiner ProSecure (Germany), will present “Authenticity, Tamper Evidence, and Tracing of Genuine Pharmaceutical Products.” Other speakers scheduled include representatives from Cortegra and ILEOS.

Voelcker will offer insights on starting a risk-based approach to protecting pharmaceutical products. He points to proposals that call for “future mandatory application of a security seal and combined security features to every pharmaceutical pack sold in Europe. The objective is to enable at least wholesalers and pharmacists to verify the authenticity of a product based on overt, covert, or forensic security features, to check for first-opening or tampering, and to identify each packaging by a unique code.”

Meylan from AlpVision will explore the use of covert marks that can be applied to identify individual items as well as the use of digital imaging to capture the unique “fingerprints” of tablets and packaging components. Meylan urges drug manufacturers who may be implementing overt numerical identification systems for use among several supply-chain partners to continue development of covert identification systems.

Packaging and labeling technologies may one day play a role in bringing about the worldwide universal access to quality medication that Chirac and his foundation supporters envision. Government and industry are invited to come together in Geneva in 2010 for a global conference “aimed at establishing the basis of an international convention to battle counterfeit medication.” Perhaps some of the themes and technologies discussed at Pharmapack may make their way to Geneva.

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