Solutions to protect pharmaceutical packaging

Counterfeit goods – including counterfeit pharmaceutical products – cost a fraction of the price of the original goods. This means that people who under normal circumstances would not have access to those products, can now afford them. TracePack offers a range of anti-counterfeiting labelling solutions and track-andtrace technology proven to protect consumers and the intellectual property of pharma manufacturers.

A ACCORDING TO THE World Health Organization (WHO), up to 2 billion people worldwide lack access to

necessary medicines, vaccines, medical devices including in vitro diagnostics, and other health products, which creates a vacuum that is too often filled by substandard and falsified products. This problem is growing as global supply chains become more complex, meaning products manufactured in one country may be packaged in a second country and distributed across borders to be marketed or sold to consumers in a third. The growth of e-commerce also contributes to this challenge by making it easier to purchase medicines online, often from unauthorised sources. Counterfeit medicines affect economies in several areas: • individuals fall victim to low-quality counterfeit products that may not adequately treat their medical needs • legitimate producers can lose sales to counterfeiters, sparking the need for steps to combat fake products and to ensure that counterfeiters do not infiltrate their supply chains • governments and their active involvement in managing healthcare in countries • entire economies, in the form of the impact on crime levels, the environment and possible effects on jobs and foreign investment.

MOST GEOGRAPHICAL AREAS ARE AFFECTED

It is often assumed that high-income countries with strong regulatory systems can effectively exclude substandard and falsified medical products from their markets, but WHO analysis shows that this is not necessarily the case. Reports on these products have been submitted by countries in Western Europe and North America as well as other high-income settings.

In an analysis of cases of counterfeit incidents involving the penetration of legitimate supply chains and reported to PSI CIS database between 2009 and 2011, Mackey et al. (2015) revealed that upper- and lower-middle income countries comprised 93% of all cases. Analysis of the health consequences of falsified medicines performed by Rahman et al. (2018) showed that the 48 reported incidents involving health damage due to falsified medicines were almost equally distributed among developing (27 cases, 56.3%) and developed countries (21 cases, 43.7%). TracePack is the licensed African distributor of Arca and specialises in the sale of equipment to mark, code or label any products. The latest labelling system within the Arca Pharma labelling machine line is the Pharma Seal 4.0,

which offers high-speed, tamper-evident label application on pharmaceutical packaging. With a compact stainless steel main base of just 1 320mm, this automatic industrial pharmaceutical labelling machine is designed to meet the requirements of tamper-evident labelling within operational pharmaceutical packaging lines. It does this by applying one or two tamper-evident seal labels on pharmaceutical formed cardboard boxes at speeds of up to 300 products per minute, with advanced 4.0 functions.

ENABLING TRACK-AND-TRACE

The customs departments of European countries seize up to 2.4m counterfeit pharmaceutical packages each year. According to WHO estimates, it is assumed that around 10% of all medicines worldwide is counterfeit. In developing countries, that proportion even rises to 30%. It is not only luxury pharmaceuticals but also antibiotics, cholesterol and cancer drugs that are in demand and the damage is not merely financial. It is therefore more important than ever in the fight against drug counterfeiters to have clear identification and traceability of the original products.

TracePack’s range of In-Sight vision systems makes it possible to verify labels safely, identify codes and optical character recognition data, ensuring the track-and-trace of pharmaceutical folding boxes. As manufacturers and brand owners prepare for compliance with global traceability requirements and transition from batch to item-level serialisation, it is important to remember that compliance requires much more than simply reading a code on a label or packaging part. For mass serialisation to support traceability, it is first

essential to verify code quality and validate that all of the encoded data is accurate and correctly formatted. The In-Sight trackand-trace software works with network In-Sight vision systems to create a complete identification and data verification solution for serialised labels on pharmaceutical packaging, making sure that you can easily and cost-effectively comply with patient safety and traceability requirements. •

TracePack – www.tracepack.co.za