Toshiba TEC Europe joins pharma anticounterfeiting initiative

Retail and industrial automation solutions provider Toshiba TEC Europe, has joined the Unisys-led EU Guardian programme, an industry-wide collaboration to secure the pharmaceutical supply chain and increase patient safety as well as batch traceability.

The EU Guardian programme workgroup believes that increased counterfeiting activity and tighter EU regulation is creating a challenging environment for the European pharmaceutical industry, which requires advanced supply chain security. The programme brings together key players within the pharmaceutical industry as well as specialist vendors and suppliers with the aim of providing a detailed plan for testing and piloting key technologies and processes.

Toshiba TEC Europe is the only desktop label printer vendor in the EU Guardian programme, providing state-of-the art know-how and high-quality hardware for both pilot projects as well as long-term technology solutions. The company's label printers actively support 1D and 2D barcodes as well as RFID solutions at all levels of packaging.

The EU Guardian programme workgroup has defined Datamatrix as the immediate target, but electronic patient records and ePrescriptions all point to the need for full electronic pedigrees and RFID in future.

'Pharmaceutical supply chain security is rapidly becoming the number one priority for those served by and within the industry. Legislation is inevitable but by being proactive the industry can look to influence such legislation and ensure that it works for all parties,' said David Collins, enterprise security initiatives practice director at Unisys. 'Guardian is an opportunity to work collaboratively to address these challenges.'

In the immediate term, the programme is working to increase the efficiency of the supply chain, while also authenticating products and medicines at the point of dispensing to patients and achieving batch traceability. This meets the programme's key strategies of ensuring patient safety, combating the increase in volume and spread of counterfeit medicines and also compliance with likely new regulation from the EU.