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| home > pmps > summer 2004 > the future of shipping: rfid technology reduces risk while raising the bar on pharma product tracking |
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Pharmaceutical Manufacturing and Packing Sourcer
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The counterfeiting of medication has become a major concern at the highest levels of government and industry, as regulators and drug manufacturers worldwide recognise that drug counterfeiters not only defraud consumers, they also deny patients safe and effective therapies. One emerging technology, radio frequency identification (RFID), enables stakeholders in the health care value chain to tag and track drugs, as well as to store a wealth of valuable information, including environmental exposure, expiration and current location.
This article will discuss the breadth of the counterfeiting problem and the advent of RFID as a potential and efficient solution that can aid in pharmaceutical and medical device companies' supply chain operations while it helps police counterfeiting.
Recently, there have been a growing number of high profile incidents of the introduction of counterfeit drugs into the pharmaceutical supply chain, including one involving the world's best-selling drug, Pfizer's statin, Lipitor. The relatively high cost of drugs in the United States combined with stringent oversight from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been partly justified by the belief that drugs distributed in the US market are safe and effective. Counterfeit drugs present several threats to patient safety, including sub- or super-potency, no active or harmful active ingredient, microbiological contamination, inappropriate packaging, storage or transportation and missing or inaccurate label information. If the incidence of counterfeiting continues to grow, then the 'safe and effective' premise is nullified; at stake is the confidence of the general public, not to mention the safety of the drug supply in the medical profession.
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By Ed Tomlinson, Managing Director, BearingPoint's Life Science Industry Practice and Attilio Bellman, Manager at BearingPoint's Global RFID Solutions
Ed Tomlinson is Managing Director of BearingPoint's Life Sciences Industry Practice. Ed has over 25 years' experience in the FDA-regulated industries, gained in North America, Europe and Asia. His areas of focus are strategic planning and operations improvement, including supply chain management (procurement, manufacturing, materials management, order management), quality assurance, regulatory compliance, clinical trials and product development.
Dr Attilio Bellman is a Manager in the BearingPoint Global RFID Solutions practice, focusing on the application of RFID technology and the related information infrastructure to the retail, CPG and pharmaceutical industries. Dr Bellman's research at the MIT/Auto-ID Center, in the US, pioneered the study of RFID application and the EPC Network information infrastructure to the pharmaceutical supply chain. He is a member of the Council of Logistics Management and has been awarded the George A. Gecowets Graduate Scholarship from the Council of Logistics Management. Dr Bellman holds a PhD in Solid State Physics from the University of Milan and a Master of Engineering in Logistics from MIT.
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