The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA)believes that a ban on repackaging will help deter the counterfeiters from entering the legitimate supply chain. The EFPIA also supported the requirement to seal the outer medicine packaging and limit the right to open the pack to the market authorization holder and the end-user (eg, hospital, doctor or patient).
The EFPIA also said that the technologies which pharmaceutical companies choose to use in creating tamper-evident seals and overt and covert authentication technologies such as holograms, optical devices and security graphics for medicines packages should be specific to each manufacturer so as to reduce the risk of copying.
EFPIA also announced that it was currently developing two verification systems – a harmonised method for coding each pharmaceutical handling unit based on the data matrix code and an end-to-end product verification system that allows systematic control of each pack’s serial numbers – for countering the threats posed by the countefeiters.
However the European parallel traders of medicines contended that a ban on repackaging would restrict the competition that parallel imports bring to patent-protected medicines. The European Association of Euro-Pharmaceutical Companies (EAEPC) also maintained that a ban on repackaging will pose a challenge to the principle of the free movement of goods in the EU and will effectively curtail the parallel trade of medicines.