Cake Decoration Identifies Pills, Fighting Drug Fraud
During lockdown, UC Riverside bioengineering professor William Grover kept busy counting the colourful candy sprinkles perched on top of chocolate drops. In the process, he hit upon a simple way to prevent pharmaceutical fraud and detailed it in the journal Scientific Reports.
He calls the technique ‘CandyCode’ and uses tiny multi-coloured candy nonpareils commonly known as ‘hundreds and thousands’ in South Africa as a uniquely identifiable coating for pharmaceutical capsules and pills.
Millions of people are harmed by counterfeit or substandard medicine, a problem which costs an estimated $200 billion annually. One in 10 medical products in developing countries is fake, according to a WHO estimate.
Prof Grover’s lab has previously worked on simple, low-cost ways of verifying the authenticity of pharmaceuticals. Other researchers have tried putting unique codes onto pills, but these solutions have drawbacks.
“The inspiration for this came from the little colourful chocolate candies. Each candy has an average of 92 nonpareils attached randomly, and the nonpareils have eight different colours. I started wondering how many different patterns of coloured nonpareils were possible on these candies,” explained Prof Grover. “It turns out that the odds of a randomly generated candy pattern ever repeating itself are basically zero, so each of these candies is unique and will never be duplicated by chance.”
This gave Prof Grover the idea that the nonpareils could be applied as a coating to each pill, giving it a unique pattern that could be stored by the manufacturer in a database. Consumers could upload a smartphone photograph of a pill and if its CandyCode matches one in the database, the consumer could be confident that the pill is genuine. If not, it is potentially fraudulent.
To test this idea, Prof Grover stuck nonpareils onto Tylenol (acetaminophen) capsules and developed an algorithm that converts a photo of a CandyCoded pill into text which could be stored on a database and accessed by consumers. Using this algorithm to analyse a set of CandyCode photos, he found they serve as universally unique identifiers, even after subjecting the CandyCoded pills to physical abuse that simulates the wear-and-tear of shipping.
“Using a computer simulation of even larger CandyCode libraries, I found that a company could produce 1017 CandyCoded pills – enough for 41 million pills for each person on earth – and still be able to uniquely identify each CandyCoded pill,” Grover said.
More colours and different shapes of nonpareils could generate even more unique CandyCodes. CandyCoded capsules or tablets have an unexpected benefit for the consumer as well.
“Anecdotally, I found that CandyCoded caplets were more pleasant to swallow than plain caplets, confirming Mary Poppins’ classic observation about the relationship between sugar and medicine,” Prof Grover remarked.
Source: EurekAlert!
