Antares Vision and Edgyn boost pharma industry anti-counterfeiting with authentication solution
29 Aug 2022 --- Antares Vision and Edgyn are partnering to deliver a comprehensive authentication solution to help combat counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry.
The company will integrate Edgyn’s Adfirmia solution into its production line, cloud and mobile applications, providing customers with “exemplary” authentication capabilities in addition to its existing traceability software.
“The partnership comes at a pivotal time for the pharmaceutical industry. Companies realized that solutions for serialization and traceability can be further empowered with authentication solutions to address the issues of counterfeiting and falsified products,” says Aurélien Tignol, CEO at Edgyn.
“Antares Vision, with its market coverage and reputation, is the right partner to help us accelerate the deployment of our solution and provide to the pharmaceutical industry, on a global scale, the ‘most’ secure, connected and non-intrusive product identification and brand protection solution on the market.”
New crowdsourcing opportunities
Edgyn’s Adfirmia digital fingerprinting solution, which has been applied to more than 1.7 billion products since 2014, creates a digital fingerprint for every package – an invisible, undetectable signature based on a product’s physical characteristics.
The partnership aims at encouraging people to report suspect products using a smartphone app. Antares Vision brings expertise in connecting physical products to digital infrastructures across the entire supply chain – from production and packaging lines to partner networks – with an ecosystem of solutions for product digitalization, serialization, supply chain transparency and consumer trust.
Tignol notes that the partnership will create new opportunities leveraging consumer engagement and patient reassurance, like encouraging people to report suspect products using a smartphone app. “Our Adfirmia solution and Antares Vision Group’s software capabilities will empower end users to get involved in fighting counterfeits,” he says.
“This partnership aims to take crowdsourcing to a new level by empowering people to participate in making the supply chain more secure. It will also add value to pharmaceutical organizations’ logistics and brand protection initiatives.”
Emidio Zorzella, Antares Vision’s CEO, adds: “Our aim of guaranteeing safety for people, products and brands is the driving force of this partnership. Our companies are fully engaged in protecting end-users through the most innovative product authentication technology, enabling end-to-end supply chain transparency.”
“As partners, Edgyn and Antares Vision Group will deliver a state-of-the-art solution, securing the pharmaceutical supply chain, combating counterfeits and safeguarding people.”
Edible security tags
In related news, researchers at Purdue University, US, are developing an edible “security tag” embedded into medicine to expose counterfeiters. The tag acts as a digital fingerprint for each drug capsule or tablet, using an authentication technique called “physical unclonable functions” – or PUF – initially developed for information and hardware security.
PackagingInsights spoke to Young Kim, associate professor at Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, about the need for security tags in the pharmaceutical industry.
Edited
By Natalie Schwertheim
