Supply Chain Security Still Desperately Needed

Improving supply-chain safety is an important mission for the pharmaceutical industry. While awareness of counterfeiting and adulteration is certainly growing, threats do remain. Counterfeiters continue to advance their own operations while the pharmaceutical industry struggles worldwide to settle on standardized solutions.

Reuters reports the shocking sum of 10.5 billion euros spent each year by Europeans "on illicitly sourced medicines, many of them counterfeit."

Rx-360 has been engaging industry for well over a year now to step up global awareness and response. Recently the group shared news of a monetary award by The Wellcome Trust to a team from King's College London to develop an inexpensive tool for low-income countries to use to identify counterfeit and substandard drugs.

Rx-360 isn't stopping there. The consortium will host an open meeting to share its progress in 2010 and its 2011 plans. The Rx-360 meeting will take place on 16 September 2010, hosted by Merck KGaA in Darmstadt, Germany, and will include presentations by Rx-360 leaders as well as supply chain integrity presentations by invited guests. To register for this meeting, please visit http://www.signmeup.com/71247.

If you cannot make the meeting, be sure to follow Rx-360 on Twitter, where one of the founding members, Martin Van Trieste, keeps followers abreast of pharma supply chain issues. (PMP News editor Daphne Allen shares his Tweets as often as she can.)

After getting involved with Rx-360, be sure to discuss your needs with the several Pharmapack 2011 exhibitors that plan to share their own novel approaches to supply-chain safety. These include Advanced Track and Trace (Booth A12), Alpvision SA (Booth B04), Arjowiggins Security (Booth D16), Catalent Pharma Solutions (Booth A16), CCL Package Label SNC (Booth E11), Chesapeake Pharmaceutical & Healthcare Packaging (Booth E17), Constantia Flexibles (Booth C35), EYEC GmbH (Booth A01), Faubel & Co. Nachfolger GmbH (Booth E52), Hologram Industries (Booth D18), Laetus France (Booth B18), Oliver-Tolas Healthcare Packaging (Booth A15), Rondo AG (Booth C22), Scanware Electronic GmbH (Booth D20), and Securikett Ulrich & Horn GmbH (Booth E34), to name a few.

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