I have a very interesting story this week – it’s with an entrepreneur who has spent the last 4-½ years developing his international start-up company. He is not a physician, but he presented one of the workshops at the recent Physicians Helping Physicians Nonclinical Career meeting in Austin Texas.
Matt McGuire is the classic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, outgoing, totally committed to his company, sleeping only about 30 hours per week. Yet his company is not based in Silicon Valley, and it’s kind of a health care technology company with a product designed to save lives and improve health care for millions of patients around the globe, by making medications safer.
However, it is not a pharmaceutical company. It is a company that sells an anticounterfeit technology called SafeStamp that can help reduce or eliminate the sale of counterfeit medications responsible for hurting millions of patients around the world.
So, who is Matt McGuire? Well, before he entered the Wharton Business School, he was a soldier deployed to Iraq for four years. While there, he discovered that terrorist groups were generating millions of dollars in cash to support their operations by selling fake medications.
With a little research, he learned that AROUND THE WORLD, fake drugs were a MASSIVE problem. Globally, 15% of medications are fake, and even poisonous, resulting in over 1 million deaths to date.
In some countries, 50% of the medications being dispensed are counterfeit. That means they are at best placebos, and at worst deadly poisons.
So, when Matt was looking for a business to start while at Wharton, it became obvious to him that developing a technology to eliminate counterfeit medications could be a HUGE opportunity.
He told us that the market for anti-counterfeit packaging technologies for pharmaceuticals alone is something like $100 billion. And there are whole markets beyond drugs where the anti-counterfeit technology can be applied.
During our conversation, Matt mentions SafeStamp – the name of the technology and of the company. It is basically a stamp, sticker or label that incorporates nanotechnology that cannot be copied. It’s similar to the holographic stamps you may have seen applied to packages of software to ensure it is not a knock-off.
But those have already been copied and no longer work well in ensuring authenticity. Matt tells me that his patented nanotechnology produces a unique reaction and color change – an orange or blue glow - by blowing on or touching the label that cannot be duplicated by counterfeiters.
To access the show notes with all of the resources Matt mentions, go to vitalpe.net/episode087.
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