The fight against fake medicines stands a better chance if you label the medicine itself rather than the packaging. Think of ‘barcodes’ that manufacturers add to pills and potions, so end users can check with their own eyes that the product is genuine. Soon, something like this may be on the market. Recently, Delft researchers published the blueprints in Advanced Materials Interfaces.

The invention by Burak Eral, assistant professor at TU Delft, and his PhD student Mengmeng Zhang, is to combat counterfeit medicines, which have been a huge problem for years, especially in poor countries. The recent tragedy surrounding poisonous cough medicine in Gambia and Indonesia, among others, which resulted in the death of about 150 children, is almost insignificant compared to the estimate that more than 100,000 people in Africa die unnecessarily every year because they relied on fake malaria medication that is barely effective or not at all. Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation (WHO) also warns of a lively trade in counterfeit corona vaccines.

Reading the code can be done with a simple microscope on a smartphone

Countermeasures have so far focused mainly on labels that are difficult to counterfeit, sometimes in combination with databases of existing batch numbers. But tamper-proof labels are often relatively expensive and not easy to read. And fraudsters have already realised that you can refill an authentic packaging with a fake product after use. Hence, more and more voices are calling for on-dose authentication (ODA), microscopic codes embedded in the medicine itself. The prerequisites are that they should not be harmful to human health, that you should be able to find and check them easily, and that forgery requires more effort than it is worth.