Trade in falsified medicines harms people around the world.
To accelerate the local detection of falsified medicines and strengthen the integrity of pharmaceutical supply chains, a cloud based analytical drug screening solution has been developed. The backbone of the solution is a secure, cloud-based database containing details of the composition of medicines. Data science and AI have been used to build prediction models to capture the manufacturing variability of solid drugs of a given pharmaceutical company produced in different dosages, raw materials, and locations. In the field, a drug sample can be authenticated using a mobile analytical drug screening device containing a spectral sensor that transmits and within seconds receives the results utilizing the database via a smartphone app. The solution allows in principle anybody to verify a sample’s authenticity within minutes.
Until now, suspect drugs have typically been shipped to a central QC laboratory which can take several weeks for obtaining the final result due to delays in transportation, customs, etc. The presented solution has cut the authentication time to a matter of days. This helps our pharmaceutical partners work with local health and law enforcement authorities to combat the worldwide threat to public health represented by falsified medicines.
