The World Health Organization (WHO) attributes over a million deaths per annum to fake drugs. Thirty per cent contain no active ingredients, rendering them of no clinical use. This problem has escalated in recent years – in 2018 PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated the value of pharmaceutical counterfeiting to be in excess of $217 billion – in part because modern computing and manufacturing technologies have drastically reduced the barrier to cloning security measures that are used as marks of authenticity.
The sophistication of the criminal gangs manufacturing fake drugs has led to the development of complex anti-counterfeiting technologies. However, this hardware is expensive, meaning that most people do not have access to it and the vast majority of products are verified by visual checks of holograms, which are easily copied.
A potential solution lies in a simple quantum technology that will mature and come to market in 2019. It relies on fingerprinting imperfections at the tiniest scale – single atoms – in quantum materials. These can be read using a standard smartphone camera, via an app, empowering anyone with a modern phone to test the legitimacy of a product they have been given or are about to buy.
One material that lends itself to this approach is graphene, which has yet to live up to its initial promise, commercially at least, in part because it is incredibly sensitive to the smallest of imperfections. This is a big problem when making electronic components, but it is a massive boon for security applications.
To fingerprint pharmaceuticals, small flakes of graphene or a similar quantum material, invisible to the human eye, can be incorporated into the surface coating of a product. When these are excited, using a bright light such as a flash from a mobile phone, they emit light – with the colour and other properties of this light depending on random atom-scale imperfections in the material that were unintentionally introduced when it was produced. In addition, the phone will also be able to read how the signal changes as it dies away, after the flash has fired.
These two data points will give every product a complex, unique code that is locked within it and which can be easily verified. This means a counterfeiter would need to atomically engineer a clone to be successful – a task that is decades from being practical.
In 2019, we will see this technology reach the mainstream, thanks to recent advances in our ability to mass-produce the materials it relies on. Add to that the very high rate of smartphone adoption, even in the developing-world countries that are hardest hit by this problem, and the fact that increasing number of countries are now requiring pharmaceutical products to include mobile authentication systems, and we may witness the end of our current epidemic of dangerous drugs.
Robert Young is director of the Lancaster Quantum Technology Centre
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
