Pfizer to Tag Celebrex

Drug counterfeiting continues to be a problem for Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies. In the first half of 2006, in fact, Pfizer's global security organization documented more than 4.9 million pills of counterfeit Viagra and 304 kilograms of sildenafil citrate (1 kilogram is enough to make about 7,000 100 mg Viagra tablets). During that same time period, the company also uncovered 100 pills of counterfeit Celebrex.

So far, wholesalers and distributors have authenticated 300,000 tagged bottles of Viagra by verifying each tag's unique Electronic Product Code (EPC) (see Pfizer Using RFID to Fight Fake Viagra). Verifying each tag's authenticity helps ensure that a product is genuine. However, no pharmacies or hospitals have yet authenticated any of the tagged bottles they've received, except for those involved in three specific pilots. Though Bond says about a dozen pharmacies have registered to begin verifying each tag's EPC code, their slow start in doing so has hindered Pfizer's 2007 RFID plans. "It's one of the reasons we aren't tagging at the item level for Celebrex," Bond says.

Moreover, Pfizer reports that in 2007, it will begin tagging all cases and pallets of Viagra with UHF EPC Gen 2 tags, rather than the EPC Gen 1 MHz UHF tags the company currently uses. For both Viagra and Celebrex, tags will be affixed to the sides of cases to ensure the most consistent reads, Bond says. To tag individual bottles of Viagra, Pfizer has been using RFID labels with 13.56 MHz HF tags containing NXP Semiconductors (Philips) ICode chips. The drugmaker says it will start testing tags compliant with the HF specification currently being developed by EPCglobal's HF Air-Interface Working Group. According to Bob Celeste, EPCglobal's director of action groups, the organization expects to ratify that specification as a standard by the third quarter of 2007.

Next year, the pharmaceutical company expects to initiate an electronic-pedigree pilot with several trading partners (see Pfizer's RFID Pilot Is the Start of Something Big). E-pedigrees are secure files, created via RFID or a similar technology, that store data regarding each move a product makes through the supply chain. Such files are used to authenticate that a product is genuine.