If you get malaria, you take medicine, and you get better.
At least, that's how the process should work, but a flood of counterfeit medications is threatening the doctors' ability to treat sick people in the developing world. A 2006 study found that more than half the anti-malarials in southeast Asia contained no actual medicine.
While public health officials fret, the increasingly sophisticated shadowy network of fake-drug producers will rake in an estimated $75
billion by 2010, according to a pharmaceutical industry research group.
Despite rapid growth in counterfeiting over the last decade, no one has quite figured out how to stop handbag knockoffs, let alone ersatz pills that the FDA admits, "can be difficult, if not impossible" to tell apart from the real thing.
Sounds just like the kind of problem that a couple of scrappy twenty-somethings with a dream can solve, right?
Maybe not, but that's just what N. Taylor Thompson and Nathan Sigworth, the youngest members of PopTech's new fellows program, are trying to do. Using cellphones to connect the people who produce drugs with the people taking them, the Dartmouth-schooled duo's big goal is to reduce the amount of counterfeit pharmaceuticals in the world by 25 percent.
"Not only are we doing something that has a positive benefit for consumers who are sick, but it's something that actually takes away from the profits of people making money on fake medicines," Sigworth told Wired.com.
Thompson and Sigworth are excellent examples of the post-internet social entrepreneurs that PopTech is trying to attract. Comfortable with the digital world, they can bring youthful vigor and tech know-how to the occasionally stodgy world of nonprofit development causes.
Perhaps most importantly, they remain optimistic that new technological and business models can overcome daunting challenges that have defeated their elders.
"How do you tackle a problem like this yourself at 22 or 23?"
Sigworth asked. "From the beginning, we've tried to surround ourselves with people from pharma and other organizations that could really help make this happen."
And it wasn't as if they chose this problem at random from the huge-world problem bin. Sigworth said that he and his partner saw a unique opportunity to fight counterfeit drugs because Big Pharma's needs match up with the needs of poor, sick people in the developing world. Like a Yahoo Pipe, they could connect corporate money to social needs.
"It really is the nexus of where public health concerns and private concerns come together," Sigworth said.
The entrepreneurs' nascent company, Pharmasecure, has developed a business model to drop the cost of authenticating drugs low enough that supply-chain security can be extended into countries like
China and India.
Using their cellphones to check identifying numbers on the drugs with the manufacturer, sick people in the developing world will be able to authenticate that the drugs they are using don't come from shady operations that often neglect to include the actual medicine in the pill. The innovation isn't the technology, it's the business model that will allow the poorest people on earth access to the technology.
They've gotten support from C. Everett Koop, former surgeon general of the United States, and fellow Dartmouth alum, and are in the process of raising capital to take their ideas from the prototype to the people who need them.
As you might expect, people working to fight counterfeit drugs don't make a lot of friends among the illegal racket, so some of Sigworth and
Thompson's plans — and their whereabouts — remain secret, but they are planning to be operating in eight countries across Asia and Africa over the next few years.
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Image: FDA
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