International Pharmaceutical Forum
April 13, 2017 in St. Petersburg hosted the International Pharmaceutical Forum, organized by the Business Association Network North-West.
The forum was dedicated to trends, technologies and innovations in the pharmaceutical industry in Russia, as well as the priorities in the development of Russian and Western companies in the Russian pharmaceutical market.
The general director of the company "Homexpharm" Alexey Martynov expressed his opinion about the problems that may arise concerning the introduction of necessary labeling of medicines with DataMatrix tags. The labeling experiment started in 2017 and, it is expected that, starting from 2018, marking will be mandatory for all preparations from the List of life-saving medications, and for all others - from 2019.
It is expected that the introduction of the drug tracking system with the help of DataMatrix tags will significantly reduce the share of counterfeit in the market, which, according to experts, is now estimated at 10-20%.
According to A. Martynov, the introduction of marking may become a reason for unreasonable increase of prices by dishonest players, although, according to the experience of European countries, where a mandatory marking system has already been introduced, the price hike was insignificant - just over 2 rubles per package. According to the expert, the cost of equipment for marking is from 60 to 259 thousand euros per production line, what can be difficult for small manufacturing companies, but it is quite affordable for medium and large factories.
For reference - at the moment the testing of the marking system is conducted by "Biocad", "Geropharm" and "R-Pharm".