Demand for anti-obesity medicines has sent demand soaring. By 2030, analysts predict that the global market for this class of pharmaceuticals could hit $44 billion, up from just $2.5 billion last year.

Almost inevitably, criminals are looking to take a slice of these profits. Ongoing disruption to global supply chains caused by the war in Ukraine and the lingering aftershocks of the pandemic are providing ample opportunities for fraudulent products to creep in.

Packaging choices have a key role to play in addressing this problem—but there is no quick fix. Instead, pharmaceutical companies will need to approach it like they’re treating a complex disease, with an in-depth, considered solution.

The scale of counterfeits

The last year has seen multiple high-profile reports of counterfeit weight loss medicines from around the world. For example, earlier this year, Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC) identified a counterfeit batch of a pharmaceutical product in circulation. These falsified products were found to be circulating within legal and illegal supply chains.

Investigations revealed that the product was a relabeled product from another brand, with entirely different contents to what the genuine article was supposed to have.

Based on these reports, NAFDAC urged importers, distributors, retailers, healthcare providers, and patients to “exercise caution and vigilance” to help keep counterfeit products out of circulation, and to carefully check any product’s authenticity on purchase. However, without the correct packaging to help identify fake products, this is easier said than done.

Examples like this are among the more visible counterfeits in circulation. The fake was ultimately spotted by a concerned member of the public, who noticed the primary packaging did not match the brand that they were used to—a common tactic among counterfeiters to pass fakes off as genuine products. Other forms of counterfeit, such as adulterated medicines containing non-standard ingredients, can be much harder to detect as having been tampered with.

It’s difficult to get a precise picture of exactly how widespread counterfeit pharmaceuticals are. World Health Organization data suggests that around 10% of medicines in low- and middle-income countries are sub-standard or counterfeits. In sub-Saharan Africa, this figure is thought to be even higher; while data is relatively scarce, the true number could be closer to 19-50%. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has found that counterfeit medicines kill 270,000 people each year in Africa’s Sahel region, which includes parts of Nigeria.

Worldwide, the market for counterfeit pharmaceutical products is thought to have a value of $4.4 billion per year, and Europol enforcers now claim that falsified pharmaceuticals now pose a “substantial threat” to affected countries.

The scale of this trade has serious ramifications for businesses and consumers alike. According to research published in 2017, 63% of people who had tried slimming pills purchased online suffered unpleasant side-effects including blurred vision and heart problems. As well as endangering public health by exposing them to potentially unsafe weight loss products, counterfeits both reduce the funds available for research and development by legitimate businesses and may cause customers to lose confidence in genuine products and the companies that sell them.

A combined approach

Unfortunately, there is no one silver bullet that will address the problem of counterfeit weight loss medicines. Every stakeholder, from manufacturers and distributors to governments, have a part to play, and coordinated action will be required to start taking these products out of the supply chain.

While regulators must be responsible for ensuring all anti-obesity products for sale in their markets are approved by appropriate authorities, and laws regarding manufacture and distribution are enforced, effective measures require counterfeits to be detectable in the first place. Responsibility for this area starts in the design phase.

Under the EU’s Falsified Medicines Directive, pharmaceutical manufacturers are required to include tamper-evident security features on their secondary packaging, alongside unique serialization codes. Features such as this have important parts to play in protecting products from counterfeiting, and increasingly, we’re seeing packaging equipped with everything from holograms to color-changing inks to provide immediate authentication.

However, used in isolation, these solutions cannot possibly provide the required standard of protection. Instead, achieving this requires a multi-layered approach.

What features are available?

With the growing popularity of slimming pills in online marketplaces, customers need to be confident that what they are buying is safe and untampered with. Effective tamper-proofing requires a combination of technologies working together to make any attempts to manipulate a product immediately apparent. Primary closures, seals, serialization, and secondary packaging must be specifically designed to be both secure and accessible to consumers.

Overt technologies enable anyone to authenticate a product, regardless of their expertise. Security labels and specialized inks are common tools in this field, immediately indicating authenticity, while tamper evident labels prevent unauthorized access and let consumers immediately identify if a product has been altered.

In this area, serialization is one of the most important tools that pharmaceutical companies have in their armory. It provides information on a product with unique numbers enhancing product traceability, offering greater oversight throughout the supply chain while establishing a clear chain of custody that makes it hard for counterfeit weight loss products to progress undetected.

Most serialization is conducted using printing or laser etching, but next-generation coding technology like MM Packaging’s Clear Code solution enables laser activation of color-changing substrate treatments—enhancing the code’s durability and providing greater contrast and clarity. This makes the product even easier to authenticate at a glance. And while MM Packaging can pre-serialize cartons and labels with the highest grading in the same production process as the packaging materials, Clear Code offers an alternative for businesses that prefer to code on their lines themselves—providing them with a tool to do so more efficiently.

Micro-Optics provide another important tool in the layering of packaging security strategies. Through the partnership with Crane Currency, MM Packaging can layer other security features alongside ProFound Micro-Optics, a system that uses small lenses that focus on even smaller customized icons to provide high-quality authentication. These icons are customizable and can include weight loss companies’ logos, making them instantly recognizable on the shelf while protecting them from counterfeiting.

The production methods behind this technology, and the equipment used in making it, are unique in the market and kept a closely guarded secret, meaning accurate replication is effectively impossible.

In contrast, covert security features are harder to detect, and often impossible to notice with the naked eye, instead requiring specialist knowledge and equipment. Digital watermarks, microtext, latent images, and other techniques work in concert to provide multiple avenues for authentication—and place more barriers to accurate replication.

The continued growth of the market for weight loss medicines heralds new challenges for manufacturers and suppliers. With a global network of complex supply chains, combined with the prevalence of online retailers selling slimming pills and more, effective anti-counterfeiting measures are paramount. Multi-layered security technologies, that can be effectively integrated into packaging designs, must become the standard.

MM Packaging aims to create secondary packaging for pharma and healthcare that puts counterfeiting out of reach. We are committed to working with the industry and our customers to provide effective, secure designs that meet their needs. By collaborating on security, utilizing the full array of security technologies available, we can make a real difference to the safety of pharmaceutical products worldwide.