Companies investing now to build high-efficiency, high-visibility, strong supply and distribution networks are the ones that will be winning over the next few years. That's the conclusion of this year's Pharmaceutical Commerce Product Security Supplement.
Yet despite that conclusion, and despite new technologies and progress on standards and regulations, pharmaceutical product security is on a three-year decline. California's decision in 2008 to postpone until 2015 its e-pedigree mandate put the brakes on technology and process solutions in the making that for the most part have yet to be revived.
The pharma industry is largely maintaining its reactive status quo of hiring investigators to locate counterfeiters, documenting cargo thefts and monitoring rogue websites.
"A saner policy should be to build a stronger, better defended supply chain that prevents diversion and counterfeiting from entering the picture," writes editor Nick Basta. "But that seems to be a leap the industry is taking painfully slowly, absent a regulatory goad."
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