NEXGEN Biotechnologies is a Seoul, South Korea biotech firm that develops and produces protein-based biological materials for the medical and cosmetics industries. The company has entered a partnership with Thin Film Electronics ASA in which NEXGEN will integrate Thinfilm’s NFC OpenSense™ technology into containers and other packaging in order to monitor shipments throughout the supply chain and address product authentication needs.
As NEXGEN continues to expand distribution into foreign markets, including China, the company is taking a proactive approach in maintaining the integrity of its products and the vast supply chain through which they are delivered. Thinfilm’s OpenSense technology will help NEXGEN combat counterfeiting, gray market diversion, unauthorized refills, and other fraudulent practices.
Trusted partners and end customers will be able to tap on packaging with a smartphone or NFC reader to determine—via Thinfilm’s Authenticator App and the CNECT cloud platform—whether the product has been tampered with of if it is factory-sealed. Taps along the distribution route will also create a supply chain audit trail that provides critical information such as date, time, and location of the spot inspections.
“As an exporter of advanced materials, we were looking for ways to build trust in our products with domestic and overseas partners, and decided to use Thinfilm’s NFC OpenSense tags.” said Sunlee, NEXGEN’s CEO. “We feel the technology will help establish confidence among our potential partners in the NEXGEN brand and its advanced materials. Additional use-case applications are also being considered.”
Thinfilm’s NFC OpenSense tags are thin, flexible labels that can detect both a product’s “factory sealed” and “opened” states and wirelessly communicate contextual content with the tap of an NFC-enabled smartphone or industrial reader. The tags contain unique identifiers that make it possible for NEXGEN to authenticate products and track them to the individual-item level using Thinfilm’s Authenticator App and cloud-based platform, CNECT™. The tags remain active even after a package’s factory seal has been broken, empowering NEXGEN to extend the dialogue with supply chain partners and end consumers.
![“Another key [UDI] benefit, because we're calling that product by the same name across the healthcare supply chain… rich and robust data that we can access around supply consumption and utilization rates. One of the buzz terms we've heard during the COVID-19 crisis was what's my burn rate? How fast am I going through gowns, masks, gloves?” – Mike Schiller, Senior Director at AHRMM](https://img.healthcarepackaging.com/files/base/pmmi/all/image/2020/08/UDI.5f4d326e41d53.png?auto=format&fit=crop&h=146&w=340)
