A falsified medicine is a risk to the patient.

It closes an important part of the problem and leaves one open. Directive 2011/62/EU and Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/161 require most prescription medicines to carry a unique identifier in a 2D code plus an anti-tampering device, verified against the European Medicines Verification System and decommissioned at dispensing. That makes an invented number very hard to use and it makes duplicates detectable. What it cannot establish is whether the code in front of you is the original print: a unique identifier copied from a genuine pack onto a falsified one verifies correctly at first, and the duplication only becomes visible after the genuine pack is dispensed somewhere else. A copy-evident layer on the same carrier removes that window, because reproducing the code destroys the pattern inside it and the copy fails the check immediately.

authentic.network puts a copy-evident code on every pack of medicine. Pharmacists, health workers and patients check it with a smartphone, no app, about a second; offline with the authentic app where coverage is weak; a falsified pack fails. Every scan shows manufacturers where falsified products appear.

This is where the need is largest and the infrastructure thinnest. Many countries have no national verification repository, no decommissioning step and no obligation on distributors to check anything. The World Health Organization estimated in 2017 that one in ten medical products in low- and middle-income countries is substandard or falsified. authentic.network verification does not depend on a national system: the answer comes from the mark on the pack itself, on any phone, without an app – and with the authentic app also without a connection. A manufacturer can protect packs for those markets without waiting for a regulator to build anything.

Anyone holding it. Distributors checking an incoming delivery, wholesalers, pharmacists at the counter and patients at home all use the same mark and the same phone camera. There is no app to install and no account to create. What the manufacturer sees is where a check happened, how often and whether it raised a case - scans cannot be attributed to a particular role or station, so a check by a pharmacist and a check by a patient look the same in the data.

No, and it should not. Where you are subject to FMD or a comparable regime, that serialisation is a legal obligation with its own repository and its own workflow. The copy-evident layer is complementary: it answers the question the identifier cannot, which is whether this physical code is the original print. Practically, it sits on the same carrier on the same pack, so it does not add a second mark, a second supplier or a second process to the packaging line.

Yes. Failed checks are recorded with time and place, in the same way successful ones are. A cluster of failures around a region, a distributor or a single batch is a signal you get while the batch is still moving rather than after a recall has been opened. Separately, each serial can carry the market it was released for, so a genuine pack checked outside its intended market is raised as a grey-market case with its article and batch attached.

The mark is a printed code, so it goes wherever your artwork goes - on the folding carton, on a label, or into existing printed elements. Size is a question of print resolution rather than of the technology: the security layer lives inside the code, so it scales with the carrier. For packs where space is already contested by an FMD identifier, a batch number and an expiry date, the practical route is usually to integrate the mark into the artwork rather than to add a separate label.