Fighting Pharmaceutical Fakes

Pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, has announced it is using radio frequency identification to fight pharmaceutical fakes.

For example, Pfizer sells five different stock-keeping units of the little blue pill that is saving the marriages of senior citizens world-wide. As each bottle of Viagra is packaged, a label with an integrated passive high-frequency tag is applied. An RFID interrogator encodes an electronic product code to each label and subsequently a second interrogator verifies the tag has been successfully encoded.

The FDA has endorsed the use of RFID as a means of authenticating and tracking individual containers of drugs throughout the supply chain, in order to create an e-pedigree showing each bottle's chain of custody. But Pfizer says it, and its distributors, wholesalers, and other supply chain partners, are not yet prepared to roll out an e-pedigree system.