Candy-coated pills could make it impossible to create counterfeit drugs

(STUDY FINDS) – Mary Poppins may have been right all along! A spoonful of sugar not only helps the medicine go down, but a bioengineering professor says it may prevent pharmaceutical fraud as well. By coating prescription drugs with candy, a new study finds that drugmakers could make it virtually impossible to create counterfeit pills.

UC Riverside’s Professor William Grover used tiny multicolored candy nonpareils to create a uniquely identifiable coating on the surface of capsules and pills. Grover calls this new technique CandyCode. The pills look just like the colorful candy sprinkles you see on the top of chocolate drops.

The study author notes that counterfeit pills and substandard medications harm millions of people each year and cost around $200 billion. The World Health Organization estimates that one in 10 medical products in the developing world are fake.

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