New serialisation[1] technology is today formally launched by Norwegian company Kezzler to lead the pharmaceutical industry’s fight back against the rapid rise of fake drugs. Counterfeited drugs not only cause an enormous economic damage of £75bn (2010) but also have a disastrous effect on societies with fake malaria killing 500,000 people in Africa alone each year.

Serialisation is widely seen as the only reliable mechanism to ensure products can be uniquely tracked and traced through the entire supply chain, thus better protecting consumers as well as corporate intellectual property.

To better prepare pharmaceuticals companies in their efforts to combat counterfeited drugs, Kezzler today formally rolls out its ground-breaking SSP platform which has been specifically designed for Product & Supply Chain Security. SSP includes serialisation and tracking technologies, which Kezzler believes is unmatched in terms of its product breadth and capability. The company has been developing and selling its technology for a number of years to multinational corporations such as Roche and industries facing similar issues managing high-volume data. A new product – Patient Adherence – now completes the suite of SSP modules.

Magnar Løken, CEO and founder of Kezzler, said:
“High volume industries such as pharmaceuticals and FMCG want to embrace enterprise serialisation but until now the technology has not been robust enough to roll this out in volume. Kezzler changes all this.

“Ten years ago we developed a new form of technology for serialisation and track and trace[2] that was built from the ground-up instead of repurposing existing technology. There are three must-have criteria: performance, security and reliability. We developed our own solution because we realised that this was not possible with conventional technology. Since this breakthrough, Kezzler has been learning how serialisation and track and trace should be designed and operated on an industrial scale. The result is specialism and expertise that is second to none. Our technology is more secure, more sophisticated, more comprehensive and more cost effective than that being offered by our competitors. We have invented concepts and theories that a few years later have been adopted globally as mainstream.

“This is a very exciting time to be involved in the industry as we are seeing a sea-change in the way companies and customers interact with each other. There is a movement away from selling a ‘mass’ product towards ‘individual’ (or individualised) products. This is going to completely alter the way in which companies and their consumers do business with each other.

Serialisation and track and trace are integral to connecting the supply chain. Kezzler will continue to lead where others follow.”

The counterfeiting problem

Modern supply chains are increasingly complex and potentially open to leakage or insertion, thereby exposing companies and consumers to potential problems, including counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is an age-old problem but one that is becoming more sophisticated and mainstream by the day. Counterfeit pharmaceuticals are particularly insidious and the fake drugs industry has rapidly developed into a multi-billion dollar business. A few key facts and figures are listed below:
§ 10% of pharmaceutical products sold worldwide are fake
§ 25% of pharmaceutical products sold in the developing world are fake
§ The fake drugs industry is worth $200bn worldwide
§ A $1000 investment in counterfeits in estimated to deliver a $300,000 return according to figures compiled by the pharmaceutical industry
§ The fake drugs industry cost the pharmaceutical industry $46bn in 2006; this figure rose to $75bn in 2010 (source: World Health Organisation)
§ Fake malaria drugs kill 500,000 in Africa each year (source: World Trade Organisation)
§ Seizures relating to the fake drugs industry in Britain have risen six-fold over the past year (source: Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency)

The issue with conventional databases

Until now, generating and validating serial numbers and tracking products relied upon databases as companies sought to adapt these traditional systems for specialised needs. However, databases have built-in limitations, which at the extraordinarily high volumes of data commonplace within the pharmaceutical industry, slow down retrieval times, increase costs and are not completely secure.

Kezzler avoids the structural flaws of traditional databases and delivers a technological breakthrough in the field of serialisation by changing the way serialisation, products and data are interconnected. As a consequence it is able to deliver an open standard, high performance, secure and reliable system at a fraction of the cost of competitors, all of whom use databases.

The Kezzler technology provides verification in less than 50 milliseconds regardless of the amount or age of the data in the system, which no competitor can match. In addition, all of them experience delays with high volumes of serial numbers in their databases. Currently no traditional database has ever been created to handle serial numbers in the region of four billion entries - a realistic amount for a manufacturer of high volume goods. If a database were to handle such a huge amount of data, it would require an investment of around half a billion dollars or more. The data centre which would have to be built for this would be similar to a Google data centre and be the size of the O2 arena. Kezzler’s systems can produce and manage four billion serial numbers for a fraction of this.