Driving transparency through serialisation
As one of the first generic pharmaceutical companies to have an IT system in place, we support our customers and partners with their own implementation processes.
The EU Falsified Medicines Directive came into effect in February 2019. All medicinal packaging now needs a unique serial number linking it to information about the product’s origin, batch number and expiration date.
Centrient Pharmaceuticals fully supports serialisation. This important initiative delivers better brand protection and helps to secure patient safety by tackling the issue of counterfeit drugs.
According to the World Health Organization, up to 15% of all medicines circulating in developed markets, as well as 30% to 40% in developing countries, are falsified. Serialisation makes the entire supply chain – from manufacturer to pharmacist – fully transparent and traceable, enabling pharmacists to verify the authenticity of a product before it’s dispensed to end-use consumers.
Delivering reliable quality is a key pillar of operations like ours. Eliminating irresponsible and unsustainable manufacturing through serialisation will help our industry to become more sustainable and reliable.
Introducing serialisation has been a major operation. It involved adapting software systems, manufacturing and inspection equipment, communication networks, and messaging with government bodies or endpoint devices at the pharmacist.
Many of Centrient Pharmaceuticals’ customers and contract manufacturing organisations (CMOs) have already been onboarded successfully. For those that remain, specific support is being offered via the creation of joint implementation project teams, the generation of unique and trackable serial numbers on behalf of customers, and compliance with aggregation requirements as well as other future regulatory requirements.