Cypheme, a French startup that fights counterfeiting, wants to authenticate the world’s most important medicines. During a pandemic, the company says, that goal matters more than ever. Its announcement was distributed on April 24, 2020, under a Shenzhen dateline of April 10.
Fake drugs reach even lifesaving treatments, and counterfeit medication kills more than one million people every year. Incepta Pharmaceuticals, which makes anti-metastatic drugs, knows the problem firsthand. It picked Cypheme to protect its medicines and, by doing so, its customers.
Under the project, hundreds of thousands of bottles of Osicent 80 carried a Cypheme anti-counterfeit sticker. AI-based software then checked whether each sticker was real. As a result, cancer patients could confirm that they were taking the right drug.
The partnership did more than reduce the number of fakes on the market. It also helped patients and sellers trust the medicine again, and sales doubled as a result. For a company whose revenue runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, that gain is far from small. The rollout also saved many lives, according to Cypheme, and it keeps saving more each day, since fake drugs of this kind can be fatal for people fighting cancer.
CEO Hugo Garcia-Cotte said authenticating medicine is about stopping the growing counterfeit threat in healthcare, and he called it invaluable for patients. He put the share of counterfeit drugs on the market at 10%. Counterfeiting, he argued, is not only an economic issue for companies but also a major health hazard that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths a year. Based on user data, conservative estimates credit Cypheme with directly saving 290 lives so far, he said. He added that the company sees it as its duty to make sure patients everywhere can get safe medicine.
Counterfeiters have also been exploiting the COVID-19 outbreak. Criminals have sold fake coronavirus medicines and surgical masks to worried and vulnerable buyers. While the world copes with the crisis, Cypheme has committed to offering its AI-based stickers to companies that supply medical goods to government agencies.
Founded in 2015, Cypheme uses artificial intelligence to verify products and defeat counterfeits. Its system studies the surface microstructure of an authentication sticker through an ordinary smartphone camera. The startup has won several awards for this work. So far it has protected 6 million products worth more than €150 million. Most of its well-known clients come from the luxury industry, though the company now wants its technology to serve global health.
