that all drug manufacturers there start putting serial numbers on products they ship to other countries, with a final deadline of July 2012. “We were in a really good place to take advantage of that regulation,” Sigworth says. “We’ve seen a huge amount of growth just in the last six months.”
Sigworth first discovered the harsh realities of health economics in India during his freshman year, when he spent a month volunteering at a hospital in a poor district of Uttar Pradesh. One day, a patient came in after having been bitten by a viper. “Instead of giving him the $12 anti-venom serum, they paid someone to watch the patient for 12 hours,” Sigworth recalls. “It was cheaper to do that. He got better on his own. I was fascinated by how differently healthcare is delivered in a place where labor is cheap and [drugs] are considered expensive.”
Even when a drug is cheap, drugmakers in India balk at paying a lot to ensure its authenticity. Sigworth offers tuberculosis drugs as an example. “These are lifesaving drugs that cost about 25 cents each,” he says. “You can’t put an expensive RFID tag on that.” Sigworth says he and his launch team spent much of their time in the early days of the company figuring out how to provide a solution that could be scaled up with very little capital commitment on the part of drugmakers.
PharmaSecure charges drugmakers per unit or per product line for the authentication codes. The typical code reads something like this: “SMS gejr887zd to +91 99010.99010 for drug authenticity.” Consumers who send the codes in for authentication aren’t charged anything beyond the normal texting fees they pay to their cellular providers.
While at Dartmouth, Sigworth and Thompson worked on a group research project with a fellow student, Ashigi Gogo, on the topic of drug counterfeiting. Gogo went on to found a company called Sproxil, which is also working on ways to combat the problem. Sproxil launched its text-based authentication codes in Nigeria in 2010 and is expanding in Africa.
With the recent financing, PharmaSecure is gaining a board member in Dror Berman, founding managing partner of Innovation Endeavors and a veteran of Yahoo.
Sigworth says PharmaSecure plans to use the new funding to expand its geographic reach and product lines. Key targets geographically include Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, he says.
The company is also working on developing new products based on the data it is collecting from consumers. Sigworth believes that information may help drugmakers solve problems that they otherwise wouldn’t even know they have. “If you’re in Poland and you see all your authentications are coming from Warsaw, you know your distributor isn’t working hard enough to penetrate other parts of the country,” he says. The company is also looking into providing medication reminders to patients to ensure they continue taking their drugs until they finish. “The public health benefit and the benefit to the companies could be very large,” Sigworth says.
