Eli Lilly Spending Millions To Combat Counterfeit Drugs

Eli Lilly is spending millions of dollars in their effort to fight counterfeiters who make fake versions of the company’s drugs. Lilly is spending $110 million in the next two years on a serialization program that will stamp each drug package it produces with a unique code and serial number. That way, the products can be tracked worldwide as they are shipped to pharmacies and doctors. The measure is expected to make it more difficult to create counterfeit Lilly drugs, since counterfeiters won’t be able to access the serialization system and won’t be able to create their own serialization codes.

The company has ramped up its counterfeiting program in recent years, as counterfeiters such as Chinese national Kevin Xu ripped off the company in high profile cases. Xu moved counterfeit Lilly products through multiple countries before attempting sell them in France as legitimate. Xu was sentenced to six years in U.S. prison in 2008, but Xu was only one player in what experts believe is a growing market. The Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, which was co-founded in 2009 in part by Eli Lilly, estimates that there are over 50,000 online pharmacies selling counterfeit products. The profits made by counterfeiters are estimated to be as high as $200 billion annually.

Not only can counterfeiting give the pharma company’s drug a bad reputation, but a shift in counterfeiter’s focus is also putting more patients in jeopardy.  Lately, counterfeiters have begun shifting their focus from lifestyle drugs (ie. erectile dysfunction pills) to antibiotics and cancer, blood pressure, or heart failure drugs.  

Lilly’s website dedicates an entire section to anti-counterfeiting efforts, and state that the company is “partnering with global government regulatory and law enforcement agencies, other pharmaceutical companies and other parties who want to ensure that patients receive only genuine medicines that are made, distributed, and sold by reputable manufacturers and pharmacies that care as much as we do about patient safety.”