India's Goose launches serialisation platform

Indian company Goose has launched a home-grown serialisation system for pharmaceutical packaging to help drugmakers meet India's forthcoming traceability requirements.

The company says the new platform -called Procon Tracker - features "highly robust encrypted serialisation and package authentication capability."

It is designed to ensure consumer safety, reduce counterfeiting and diversion and "meet multiple stakeholder expectations throughout the product supply chain from the point of manufacturing to consumer end," according to Goose.

India's Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) has made it mandatory for drugmakers to print a barcode on every product exported out of the country in the wake of allegations that some domestic firms ship out counterfeit medicines.

The country's Commerce Ministry recently made it mandatory for all medicines manufactured and exported out of the country to have a barcode from July 1, although this date now appears to have been set back to October 1 (see India setting back serialisation deadlines?).

"There is no doubt that pharmaceutical products will eventually be identified at the item level by a serialised code and that chain-of-custody, or pedigree, records documenting their travels through the supply chain will be required," according to Goose.

The GS1-compliant system is based on proprietary serial number generation and encryption algorithms, and does not store serial numbers as an added security layer. It also supports offline tracking for supply chain participants which do not have access to the main database.

Codes can be printed in human-readable form below the barcode, and end-users can use SMS, voice-recognition over the telephone or a website to validate numbers.

Goose already offers a wide range of software packages for pharmaceutical and telecommunications companies. Its pharma portfolio includes software to manage a range of business processes, including regulatory affairs, packaging artwork, project management and keeping track of consumables.