Future of Life Sciences Technologies – Interview with Desmond Creary, Health Business Leader of the Americas, Microsoft
Written by The Adents TeamDesmond Creary was a recent presenter at the Adents Serialization Innovation Summit, Americas, and sat down with us in the video below to discuss the future of life sciences technologies, why integrity in the supply chain is so important, and how the work that both Adents and Microsoft are doing goes beyond serialization and truly impacts peoples lives.
The issue of counterfeit medicines has become increasingly pressing, both in terms of the economic cost of this global black market and the risk to human life that comes from taking counterfeit drugs that may not have the same active pharmaceutical ingredients or dosage levels as the real thing.
Day after day, people are ingesting either the wrong or counterfeit medications. In many developing countries in Asia, Africa and South America, counterfeit drugs comprise between 10% and 30% of the total medicines on sale. As such, governments around the world are tightening up their supply chain integrity requirements in hopes of slowing the global flow of fake medications. In the European Union, the Falsified Medicines Directive stipulates that pharma companies and others in the drug supply chain will need to serialize their products for track-and-trace by February 2019, in less than one month. The US introduced the Drug Supply Chain Security Act in 2013, giving the industry until 2023 to institute full, unit-level track-and-trace systems for products as they move through the supply chain.
Consumers, governments and companies are demanding greater transparency about where and how goods get delivered. Consumers are concerned about quality, safety, sustainability, ethics and environmental impacts. Transparency is more than just being able to see further into a supply chain.
The drug supply chain represents the most obvious candidate for improvement with blockchain, which could lead to a drug supply system that is more secure, more efficient and less expensive to operate in.
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