Drug counterfeiting is now a multi-billion pound global industry with manufacturers spending vast amounts on efforts to combat the forgers. The impact of this counterfeiting is not only felt in terms of cost within the industry itself but also in health terms, as the fake drugs being sold can at best prove ineffective to users, and in the worst cases can be fatal.

The users who are hit hardest are the world’s poor, with the World Health Organisation estimating that up to 25% of medicines consumed in the developing world are counterfeit or substandard.

In order to address this international problem, colour chemists from the University of Leeds are working in partnership with Inovink Ltd and the University of Bradford to develop a new security ink system that will make it much more difficult to copy pharmaceutical products & packaging.

The finished product will be used on inner and outer packaging and be read by a hand-held detector.

Programme manager, Riddhi Shukla says, ”At the moment pharmaceutical companies use a variety of technological methods to keep their products from being copied, for example with holograms and barcodes, but our system would add another dimension to the security already in place. “ Researchers have applied for a patent for the ink they have developed through research which is being carried out thanks to a grant from WRHIP Proof of Concept fund.