Serialization: Aiding the Fight against Counterfeit Drugs

The world is encountering an unrelenting and ever-increasing menace from counterfeit, tainted, or side-tracked prescription drugs. In view of this growing threat, many countries have started to address weaknesses in the pharmaceutical chain by enabling legislation which, among other things, require an elaborate system, most often known as serialization. Major mature markets like the United States of America have adopted serialization techniques against their fight against the counterfeit drugs. One example of such a technique is the E-Pedigree (electronic pedigree) of pharmaceutical drugs adopted by the USA. In the hyper competitive pharmaceutical market, waiting to see how the market responds is not an option. Pharmaceutical experts claim that it is imperative to be a leader in the industry to survive the needs and regulations that keep coming up and hence most pharmaceutical companies have already started to focus on implementing a serialization approach and diving deeper into the supply chain of their products to cooperate with their trusted partners and to meet and develop production line serialization solutions.