Healthcare Technology Featured Article

September 11, 2013

Nanotechnology Produces Tiny, Edible Barcodes to Spot Counterfeit Medication


Given the bite healthcare takes out of the global economy, it’s no surprise that counterfeit drugs are big business. Drug counterfeiters are not new: they have existed since the age of snake-oil salesmen. But the harm they cause seems to multiply each year: by some estimates, counterfeit medicines cost 100,000 people their lives each and every year. Bad knock-off medicine often contains little to none of the active ingredient it’s purported to contain, and batches tested have been found to be contaminated with all sorts of alarming ingredients.

The problem is rampant, particularly in developing nations. The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that 10 to 30 percent of the medicines on sale could be counterfeit in the developing world. This figure may be even higher in some parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Meanwhile, counterfeit medicines are still finding their way to pharmacy shelves even in the U.S. and Europe.

Keeping counterfeit medications out of the supply chain and out of patients’ hands is tricky. The medicines often look like the real stuff, and testing every batch that is sold and resold is not feasible. This is a place where microtechnology and nanotechnology can help. 


Image via Shutterstock

TruTag Technologies recently debuted “edible barcodes,” or tiny barcodes that can be scanned to authenticate a product. The barcodes (which don’t have to be used on ingestible products, but can be) are the size of a dust speck and thinner than a strand of hair, according to a recent profile in Bloomberg Businessweek.

“A gram of TruTag microparticles contains over 12 million unique tags,” the company’s president, Kent Mansfield, told Bloomberg.

The tiny tags are made of silicon dioxide (silica), which is highly durable and ingestible. The process of producing them involves etching microscopic barcodes into silica wafers in a manner similar to the production of semiconductors. Once engraved, the wafers are ground into a white powder that can be mixed directly into foodstuffs like baby formula or incorporated into the coatings of pills.

Special scanners, which can be built into hand-held devices such as iPads, can then be used to scan individual pills and determine their manufacturing origin. (It seems unlikely that drug counterfeiters will be able to master the process anytime soon in order to fake the provenance of their products.)

TruTag says its goal, ultimately, is to produce an app for smartphones and tablets that consumers can use so they can authenticate medications or other products themselves before they purchase or consume them.




Edited by Alisen Downey
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