Bioinkjet Printing and Protein Tagging of Camouflaged Biosafe Quick Response Codes for Medicine Authentication

Abstract

Online pharmacies and social media platforms are responsible for the growing presence of counterfeit medicines, and the verification and authentication of dosage levels are imperative for protecting individual medicines. However, the existing anticounterfeit methods for medicines and exterior box‐level protection are often limited, and they focus on pharmaceutical supply chains instead of empowering patients. Here, bioprinting and taggant construction of camouflaged biosafe quick response (QR) codes are introduced for on‐dose (or in‐dose) medicine security, integrated with the dosage form. Machine‐readable color QR codes contain concealed invisible patterns with biologically safe near‐infrared absorption properties, which help enhance the security of conventional QR codes. The reported bioinkjet printing and protein taggant construction guarantee printability, imperceptibility, stability, biocompatibility, digestibility, and tamper resistance to be an inherent part of each unit of medicine in solid dosage formats. Camouflaged biosafe QR code taggants can offer various medicine security applications including anticounterfeit measures, authentication features, track‐and‐trace, and serialization at the dosage level. This approach is expected to empower patients to play an active role in fighting illicit medicines and pharmaceutical products.

Encapsulating Fe3O4 Nanoparticles and Carbon Dots in a Metal–Organic Framework for Magnetic Fluorescent Taggants

“…Due to the demand for taggants in the fields of biological imaging, anticounterfeiting identification, environmental tracing, latent fingerprints identification, and suspicious object tracking, different types of markers such as fluorescent taggants, , spectroscopic taggants, , protein tagging, DNA tacers, and magnetic inks , have been widely studied, enabling the marked objects to have recognizable labeling information for observation and identification. Ideal taggants should be distinguishable, allow for accurate and quick retrieval of labeled information, and possess good stability and environmental adaptability for long-term labeling.…”