Fighting fake medicines
Fake drugs are on the rise globally. To help remedy this situation, which kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, Novartis is using novel digital tools to detect counterfeit drugs and support crime fighters around the world in their quest to prevent falsified medicines from reaching the market.
Text by Goran Mijuk, photos by Laurids Jensen
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Lucrative criminal business at the expense of patientsDeepening collaborationDigital technology boostPublished on 05/06/2020
Hope and despair may sometimes look just the same with no one realizing the difference until it is too late.
Théophile Sebgo knows all about this tragic chasm. During his youth in Burkina Faso some 25 years ago, his father told him never to buy medicines from street market dealers who would offer their wares at a discount to pharmacies and where the poor would generally get their medical treatments. His father, a police investigator, knew it was the only safe way to escape the potential risk of buying a fake medicine with its potential deadly consequences.
“I never forgot the warning from my father”, Théophile Sebgo remembers. “Initially, I didn’t really understand why he was so insistent about this. But once I started to grasp the risk, I wanted to know more, and so I started to study pharmaceutical engineering and specialized in identifying fake and substandard drugs.”
That one day he would work as a field investigator and forensics manager traveling the globe for Novartis was not on the cards when he started his studies in Morocco and later in France. In his early days, even when he joined the company roughly 10 years ago as a PhD student, Théophile worked predominantly in the lab, running a gamut of tests to establish whether drug samples he received from all corners of the globe were false or genuine.
Starting around 2010, the development of mobile spectrometers partly changed this laborious work regime. The new tools, which use light waves to identify the constituent materials of a drug, could be carried around as a sort of mini-lab and provide analysis for some drugs in a short period of time.
“This was a huge leap for our industry,” Sebgo remembers. “In the past, it was expensive and time-consuming to ship samples to laboratories, where researchers would work for a long time before they could establish the quality of a medicine and send results back to authorities.”
While the first mobile spectrometers have been in use for around 10 years, a new generation of small handheld mobile tools, which can be connected with an iPhone, are set to give the anti-counterfeit efforts at Novartis a timely boost.
