Aegate News

Aegate achieves significant patient protection milestones

Aegate's authentication system, which is fully compliant with the new European legislation for falsified medicines, has achieved new milestones that substantially increase the level of patient protection for European consumers. Aegate's system is now available to 88% of pharmacists in Belgium, 85% in Greece and 90% of pharmacists in Italy. In total this enables approximately 40,000 of the 160,000 pharmacists in Europe to be ready for the European Legislation once it is implemented. Aegate also recently achieved ISO accreditation confirming the reliability and robustness of its security procedures to support genuine producers of medicines and pharmacists.

Medicines authentication is a mechanism which utilises a unique code number affixed to an individual tamper-evident medicinal package. When the unique code is read by a scanner connected to the authentication database, important safety information, including verification that the pack is not a counterfeit or recalled, can be relayed back to the health professional connected to the system.

Commenting on these achievements Gary Noon CEO Aegate said "reviewing the most recent outcomes from Aegate's system there is no doubt that an authentication system has significant patient safety benefits. In 2010, Aegate informed pharmacists of 48,571 individual packs that were recalled and 8820 packs that were soon to expire or had expired, demonstrating the clear benefits of rapid and real time mechanism to deliver this information to pharmacists immediately before dispensing".

The new European legislation for falsified medicines will mean adoption of an authentication system will soon become mandatory, which will without doubt limit the economic attractiveness of placing counterfeit medicines into the market. Given the rise in counterfeit medicines in Europe year on year, estimated by the European Commission as 10-20% per annum, Aegate urges the Commission to proceed to the next step of preparing the implementation acts without delay to ensure that pharmacists can start to install authentication barriers as soon as possible.