Gilead Brand Protection – From Imprinted Pills to Holographic Tamper Seals

A new trend among counterfeiters is to target high-value drugs like HIV antivirals in both the developing and developed world. This problem was highlighted in 2020 and 2021, when Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Gilead warned that counterfeits of several HIV medications had been discovered circulating in the US.

In 2022, Gilead sued a ring of drug sellers and distributors that had allegedly sold 85,247 counterfeit vials, worth more than $250 million to US pharmacies. According to media sources, Gilead’s Biktarvy drug retails for around $3,500 per vial and Descovy for $2,000. Both drugs represent over $10 billion in annual sales for Gilead.

Modus operandi

Investigations into the drug ring revealed that unauthorised distributors were selling Gilead drugs to pharmacies sourced from various shell entities as part of the illegal counterfeiting scheme. The counterfeiters used authentic Gilead vials that at one point contained authentic Gilead HIV or other medications. The tamper-evident seals of these authentic vials had been broken, and their contents emptied. The counterfeiters inserted the foreign tablets into these empty vials and then re-sealed them.