Edible unclonable functions.

Jung Woo Leem,Seung Ho Choi,Young L Kim,Young Min Song,Seong-Ryul Kim,Seong-Wan Kim,Robert J Young,Min Seok Kim

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-14066-5

Abstract

Counterfeit medicines are a fundamental security problem. Counterfeiting medication poses a tremendous threat to patient safety, public health, and the economy in developed and less developed countries. Current solutions are often vulnerable due to the limited security levels. We propose that the highest protection against counterfeit medicines would be a combination of a physically unclonable function (PUF) with on-dose authentication. A PUF can provide a digital fingerprint with multiple pairs of input challenges and output responses. On-dose authentication can verify every individual pill without removing the identification tag. Here, we report on-dose PUFs that can be directly attached onto the surface of medicines, be swallowed, and digested. Fluorescent proteins and silk proteins serve as edible photonic biomaterials and the photoluminescent properties provide parametric support of challenge-response pairs. Such edible cryptographic primitives can play an important role in pharmaceutical anti-counterfeiting and other security applications requiring immediate destruction or vanishing features.

Highlights

Counterfeit medicines are a fundamental security problem
We introduce the combination of physically unclonable function (PUF) and ondose authentication to guarantee a high security level for anticounterfeiting of medicines
Challenge-response pairs differentiate our protein-based PUFs from other common unique objects and tags[29,63]

Summary

Introduction

Counterfeit medicines are a fundamental security problem. Counterfeiting medication poses a tremendous threat to patient safety, public health, and the economy in developed and less developed countries. On-dose authentication maximally reduces the opportunity for illegitimate sellers to use expired, counterfeit, or substandard drugs In this respect, a few promising technologies have recently been introduced with the potential of digital authentication, including digitally encoded polymers[13], QR-coded microtaggants and advanced wrinkle-based tags[14,15], QR code printing of active pharmaceutical ingredients[16], encoded-multifunctional hydrogel microparticles[17], large-scale microparticle arrays[18], encoded metal nanomaterials[19,20], and silica microtags[21]. The hybridization method can yield transformed silkworms with multiple successive generations and produce fluorescent silk in large amounts

Methods

Results

Conclusion