RFID in pharma: Abbott and 3M take it beyond the pilot

3M’s long heritage in specialty adhesives and labels has made it an obvious partner for companies trying to attach radiofrequency identification (RFID) tags to products for track and trace projects, but until this year it has kept a low profile in the pharmaceutical sector.

In the last months, however, 3M has moved on from a beta testing phase with its solution – which has been carried out in partnership with Abbott Laboratories, and in 2009 has started actively promoting its technology into the pharmaceutical sector.

“A lot of the talk about RFID in the pharmaceutical space seems to be stuck in debate about read-rates, tags and standards, and there seems to be a lot of confusion about where the value in the technology lies,” said Erik Johnson, marketing development manager at 3M’s Track and Trace Solutions unit, in an earlier interview.

“What we have here is a complete roll-out of a closed-loop system with read-points at hundreds of user locations across the USA. It represents a transition from what has been a ‘pilot’ technology to something that has been taken up to the commercial scale,” he added.

The label specialist started its project with Abbott back in 2006, with the brief of implementing an RFID-based track-and-trace system for one of the drugmaker’s most valuable products, an injectable prostate cancer drug called Lupron Depot (leuprolide acetate), which is priced at around $1,000 per dose.

The initial aim of the project was to guard against counterfeiting of the product, which according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists is a ‘high-risk’ product. The brief was to ensure authenticity of product when it was delivered to the urology clinics in the scheme, but also to provide other business benefits, such as reducing the risk of product loss as it passed through the distribution chain and to provide real-time visibility of inventory across the USA.

Despite being introduced in the late 1980s, Lupron remains a widely-used and profitable brand for Abbott. Sales of the entire range, most of which are accounted for by the Lupron Depot formulation, were nearly $200 million in the second quarter of 2009, up nearly 30 per cent year-on-year.

Another objective for Abbott was making its product more competitive in the marketplace, both from other branded products and generic versions of other members of the Lupron product family. The company wanted to explore ways in which RFID could be used to differentiate its product from its rivals.

3M came up with the idea of the LuproLink system, which involved tagging Lupron Depot down to the unit level using a high-frequency RFID tag supplied by Texas Instruments. The database and IT infrastructure is operated by 3M, and the firm also helped develop a simple software programme that could be installed by the end-users, i.e. the urology clinics dispensing the drug to patients.

At the point of product dispensing, the practitioners use the system to link the attributes of the product to the patient who is receiving it, said Johnson. “That association brings the most value to the clinic and the manufacturer as it automates the billing for the product.”

By early 2007, 3M had assembled a pilot version of the tracking network, customised software to Abbott’s specifications, installed the first readers and linked the system together via a data centre. By October of that year the system was fully installed and operational.

The system now covers 600 readers at 400 locations operated by around 230 clinical practitioners, and tracks over 60,000 doses of the drug each year.

Critically, it tracks each dose through billing and reimbursement, and Abbott says it has already come across cases where the inventory tracking element of the system identified doses that were dispensed but did not show up on the paper record. For the clinic, each time that occurred was a equivalent to $1,000 in lost reimbursement.

It also gives a clear picture for clinic staff on dose scheduling, allowing them to send out reminders to patients. That in turn may boost compliance with treatment regimens and, perhaps, even improve clinical outcomes.

From a commercial perspective, the LuproLink system also appears to be providing the competitive benefits Abbott sought. The supply chain security and other benefits are prompting some clinics to switch to using Lupron Depot from other products, it says, while there are signs that existing customers are increasing orders for the product.

The success of the Abbott programme seems to have brought in other customers, with an unnamed company in the medical device area likely to be the next to be unveiled.

It looks like - at long last - RFID may be finding a toehold in the pharmaceutical sector, some five years after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) singled it out as a key technological weapon in the quest for supply chain security in the industry.