Fighting Falsified Medicines – The Novartis Way

Continuing our series of articles on the strategic perspectives of leading brands in their fight against fakes, this month we turn our attention to Novartis, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, and the fourth largest in terms of revenue in 2022.

Novartis’ product categories include innovative medicines, generic medicines and biosimilars. It is consistently listed as one of the top five companies on the Access to Medicines Index, which ranks companies according to how well they make products accessible and affordable in low- and middle-income countries.

Novartis’ cross-functional Anti-Falsified Medicines Working Group, established in 2017, manages the company’s activities in combatting falsified and counterfeit medical products. It also has a China Anti-Counterfeiting Working Group to accelerate efforts in this strategically important country. Novartis is among the few companies reporting their anti-counterfeiting efforts in annual reports.

Its strategy is focused on two areas: rapid authentication and reporting of falsified medicines, and collective action.

As well as applying serialisation and tamper-evident features to its medical packages, Novartis uses mobile solutions to accelerate field-based detection. One such solution is Authentifield, which was first introduced in Ghana in 2019.

Authentifield consists of a mobile spectrometric sensor that can reduce the time needed to authenticate suspect medicines from several weeks to a maximum of five days. By early 2023, Novartis’ aim was to train 1,000 end users and deploy 500 sensors in 96 countries across 100 high-risk products in its portfolio.

Another technology is MoVe, a mobile platform enabling Novartis employees to quickly verify the authenticity of secondary packaging for any product. The solution is active in 49 countries.

Novartis also actively monitors its 25 most targeted products on online pharmacies, social media, and commercial platforms.

These different initiatives enabled Novartis, in 2022, to investigate 213 incidents in 48 countries and work closely with law enforcement on 74 enforcement actions, leading to the seizure of 1.2 million units of falsified medicines.

Other initiatives include a project with 12 other major pharmaceutical companies to develop a use case for blockchain technology in the pharma supply chain.

Through its Value Chain Academy, Novartis offers educational courses on quality in supply, falsified medicines, and supply chain management. These courses are provided to stakeholders including governmental associations, distributors, hospital pharmacies, and non-governmental organisations. In 2022, Novartis engaged with over 8,100 critical stakeholders across 27 countries.

In addition, it has built a systematic escalation mechanism to report all confirmed incidents of falsified medicines to local health authorities, in line with local laws and regulations, as well as to the World Health Organisation within the recommended 10-day timeframe.