Mobile technology combats drug counterfeit in India

A new pharmaceutical venture between the USA and India has launched an innovative mobile-based anti-counterfeit scheme.

Sproxi, a US-based pharmaceutical company, has launched in India and revealed a product designed to combat any drug counterfeit issues.

Mobile Product Authentication (MPA) enables consumers to check the authenticity of a pharmaceutical product by sending the unique code on the drug as a free text message to the manufacturers in real time.

The service then confirms whether a brand is genuine or not.

India suffers from a huge trade in black market pharmaceuticals.

Ashifi Gogo, CEO of Sproxil, said: “India has one of the largest pharmaceutical markets in the world, but is plagued by counterfeit medicines made elsewhere that tarnish the brands in question.

“Our services enable Indian companies to reduce the presence of counterfeit medicines by connecting companies directly to their consumers in a scalable manner, using mobile phones.”

Spraxil launched the first national mobile-based anti-counterfeit service in Africa and has also sold millions of anti-counterfeit labels that service some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

Many of these companies are now looking to build on the SMS service by seeing if verification codes and similar authentication methods can be sent by mobile social networking sites.