More than twenty technology companies are responding to a call to support the fight against counterfeit medicines spearheaded by the IMPACT task force set up by the World Health Organization (WHO) and partners.* They will join the IMPACT Working Group on Technology today for a one-day meeting in Prague to assess technologies which could improve the global prevention, tracking and detection of counterfeit medicines.

"Technologies can speed up health results in all sorts of ways," said Dr Howard Zucker, Assistant Director-General for Health Technology and Pharmaceuticals at WHO and Chair of IMPACT. "In the case of anti-counterfeiting, the challenges we face are finding technologies that cannot themselves be counterfeited and transferring them to resource poor settings at an affordable cost. While technology alone cannot solve the problem, some of these solutions could greatly enhance the ability to detect and deter the distribution of counterfeit medicines."