Sproxil has collaborated with IBM to use its technology to help the pharmaceutical industry reduce drug counterfeiting and allow consumers to verify the authenticity of prescriptions in seconds through their mobile phones.  

Through its collaboration, Sproxil is extending the manufacturers’ ability to view and analyse real time consumer data to detect and prevent drug counterfeiting in developing countries, where 25 to 50 per cent of medicines are believed to be counterfeit, costing the industry $75 billion a year. 

The company will also use IBM’s cloud service to provide clients with secure, reliable data access virtually anywhere, a statement from Sproxil said.

Its pharmaceutical clients, such as Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, have been able to combat counterfeiting by using the company’s mobile product authentication (MPA) solution to affix a scratch-off label with a unique code to each package of medication.

Upon purchase, consumers scratch the label to reveal the code, which they then send via a free text message to a telephone number provided on the package. Within seconds, consumers receive a return text message from Sproxil letting them know if the medication is genuine or fake.

As a part of this process, the company’s MPA solution produces a large, rapidly flowing stream of information concerning pharmaceutical sales and suspected incidences of counterfeiting that pharmaceutical manufacturers have access to through Sproxil’s client portal.  

To make it easier for its clients to view and analyse this market data, Sproxil turned to IBM’s ILOG Elixir software, which provides rich visuals such as advanced charts and graphics.

Using these and other new capabilities, pharmaceutical manufacturers around the world will be able to better manage and analyze petabytes of transaction data in real time, the statement said.

Now, pharmaceutical companies can more easily identify patterns in counterfeiting and deploy their resources accordingly, it said.  Sproxil’s new portal featuring ILOG will be launched during the second quarter of 2012.

“Many of our clients are in locations where high-speed internet connectivity is unreliable or nonexistent,” said Dr Ashifi Gogo Sproxil, CEO, Sproxil. “Through our work with IBM, we can enable our clients to render charts with high-speed, even in low-bandwidth situations. Through IBM’s cloud service, we are also able offer clients secure and reliable application availability no matter where they are located.”

“Sproxil continues to advance its MPA solution to make it easier for us to successfully prevent consumers from being subjected to counterfeit medications,” said Chokri Ahmadi, business director, Merck Group, West Africa Region. “The new dashboard will allow us to make better use of the data we receive through the client portal, which in turn should help our business and our customers.”

Counterfeit medicines have become a critical issue for developing nations, with an impact measured in lives. For example, of the one million malaria deaths that occur worldwide each year, 200,000 are reportedly the result of counterfeit anti-malarial drugs.

Additionally, the WHO indicates that 700,000 Africans die annually from consuming fake anti-malarial or tuberculosis drugs.

“Sproxil and IBM share a commitment to using technology to protect the health and safety of people around the world,” said Paul Chang, supply chain solutions leader, IBM. “With the help of IBM, Sproxil and its clients are making prescription drugs safer for millions of people who live in areas where counterfeiting is rampant.”

Using IBM SmartCloud, the company is benefiting from the cost savings and scalability associated with a cloud environment while preserving the ability to take advantage of the security, existing applications, reliability, management and support services more typical of a private cloud.  

IBM is an expertise in the pharmaceutical industry and works with most of the world's pharmaceutical and life sciences companies in support of their discovery and development processes and provides business analytics to help deliver more personalised treatments. – TradeArabia News Service