Candy-Coated Pills Could Prevent Pharmaceutical Fraud
hubie writes:
Colorful nonpareils can uniquely identify drug capsules and counterfeit fashions:
While most of us were baking sourdough bread and watching "Tiger King" to stay sane during the pandemic shutdown, UC Riverside bioengineering professor William Grover kept busy counting the colorful candy sprinkles perched on top of chocolate drops. In the process, he discovered a simple way to prevent pharmaceutical fraud.
The technique, which he calls CandyCode and uses tiny multicolored candy nonpareils or "hundreds and thousands" as a uniquely identifiable coating for pharmaceutical capsules and pills, is published in Scientific Reports.
[...] "The inspiration for this came from the little colorful chocolate candies. Each candy has an average of 92 nonpareils attached randomly, and the nonpareils have eight different colors. I started wondering how many different patterns of colored nonpareils were possible on these candies," said 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."
[...] To test this idea, Grover used edible cake decorating glue to coat Tylenol capsules with nonpareils and developed an algorithm that converts a photo of a CandyCoded pill into a set of text strings suitable for storing in a computer database and querying by consumers. He used this algorithm to analyze a set of CandyCode photos and found they function 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 10^17 CandyCoded pills-enough for 41 million pills for each person on earth-and still be able to uniquely identify each CandyCoded pill," Grover said.
[...] "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," said Grover.
Journal Reference:
Grover, W.H. CandyCodes: simple universally unique edible identifiers for confirming the authenticity of pharmaceuticals [open] Sci Rep 12, 7452 (2022).
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-11234-4
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