CertiRx Partners with Croatian Firm to Combat Counterfeit Drugs

Example of TraxSecur products being developed by CertiRx. -- courtesy of CertiRx

By Barry Teater, NCBiotech Writer

Counterfeit products, including bogus pharmaceuticals, account for 5 to 7 percent of the world’s trade, according to the International Chamber of Commerce. That’s a $600 billion industry, and growing.

Worldwide, an estimated 10 percent of all medicines are counterfeit, not only costing drug-makers $75 billion or more annually in lost sales but threatening human health as patients unknowingly take falsified medicines that have inactive or toxic ingredients.

Enter CertiRx Corp., a small startup company in Research Triangle Park created to help companies protect their brands and product revenues from counterfeiters.

Early funding started with NCBiotech loans

CertiRx set up shop in 2010 in the First Flight Venture Center, a technology incubator in the Park. The North Carolina Biotechnology Center awarded the company a $30,000 Company Inception Loan in 2011, and the following year CertiRx landed $150,000 in federal funding.

NCBiotech also helped boost the company with a $247,270 Small Business Research Loan in 2012, followed by a $170,700 Strategic Growth Loan in 2014. The company has also secured more than $625,000 in venture funding.  

CertiRx has developed security-tagging technology designed to make counterfeit or stolen pharmaceuticals and other products easier to detect. The technology turns existing installed printers, cameras and manufacturing equipment into delivery and detection devices for the security tagging of products throughout the supply chain.

One of its offerings, called TraxSecur, is a data-carrying security mark for products that can be authenticated with a mobile phone.

Combining technology with IN2trace development

Now CertiRx is teaming with a Croatian company, IN2trace Ltd. (acquired by ACG), to combine its TraxSecur authentication technology with IN2trace’s CureCloud “serialization” technology into one software package, called TraxSecur Serialized Security. Serialization allows a unique, high-security mark to be given to each package, product, batch, manufacturer or brand owner.

The marriage of the two technologies “delivers protection from damaging copies, emulations and database hacks, while leveraging the investment already required for compliance to government serialization mandates, as there are for products like pharmaceuticals,” CertiRx said in a news release announcing the partnership.

“These programs will provide brand owners with rich data, ready to be mined by IN2trace’s impressive analytics with the best presentation graphics that we have seen,” said CertiRx president and CEO Tom Mercolino.

In addition to pharmaceuticals, the security-tagging technology applies to many other industries including toys, luxury, food and beverage, alcohol, tobacco and electronics, said IN2trace Managing Director Kresimir Duracic.

Document security also in the mix

Another CertiRx product, AuthentiForm, shares the technology platform with TraxSecur and is a security solution for PDFs, digital display images and printouts from secure digital environments. It is intended to plug the so-called "analog hole" while uniquely identifying these renderings, verifying document authenticity, and detecting and localizing content fraud.

AuthentiForm can be used to verify academic credentials, financial instruments, electronic health records, prescriptions, clinical trial documents, vital records, and virtually every document relevant to corporate compliance.

IN2trace is one of 12 interconnected companies owned by the IN2 group, a customized software solutions company based in Zagreb, Croatia. IN2trace focuses on software that provides and manages serialization codes for the security of company products throughout the supply chain.

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