Geneva, Switzerland | February 26, 2025
The Fight the Fakes Alliance is excited to extend the warmest welcome to Fondation Pierre Fabre and the Italian Center for Coordinated Research (CRC) in Precision Medicine and Chronic Inflammation at the University of Milan as our newest members, as of January 2025. These newly formed partnerships are important steps toward tackling the enormous problem of substandard and falsified medicines through a combination of research and practical interventions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where the trafficking of fake medicines claims nearly 500,000 lives annually and causes thousands of deaths annually.
Fondation Pierre Fabre
Fondation Pierre Fabre has been historically active on the topic of substandard and falsified medical products. Late Pierre Fabre, Founder of Fondation Pierre Fabre in 1999, noted that “In the poorest countries, medicines are too often non-existent or of dubious quality because they are insufficiently controlled, or even fatally counterfeited…The Pierre Fabre Foundation was created to actively participate in correcting these imbalances by improving access to quality medicines and care”. As a continuous effort to combat substandard and falsified medical products, this previous November, Fondation Pierre Fabre took part in a roundtable about concrete strategies and actions to eradicate fake medicines and strengthen the security of African healthcare systems as a part of the Africa CSR & Health Forum alongside FtFA member the Brazzaville Foundation.
Italian Center for Coordinated Research in Precision Medicine and Chronic Inflammation at the University of Milan
The CRC in Precision Medicine and Chronic Inflammation at the University of Milan research focuses on precision medicine which aims to tailor the approach to the patient by prescribing the most appropriate drug to ensure the best response while minimizing the possibility of experiencing side effects. As the President of the Center, Giovanni Damiani, MD, PhD, brings extensive experience in tailoring treatments to specific patient profiles with a focus on dermatology, an area that is also largely impacted by substandard and falsified medicines.
The Alliance is proud to welcome these two esteemed organizations and looks forward to a future of impactful collaboration in the fight against SF medicines within the global health practice.
About Fight the Fakes
Fight the Fakes is a multi-stakeholder non-profit association that aims to raise awareness and influence change about the proliferation of substandard and falsified medicines. Our partners represent healthcare professionals, manufacturers, wholesalers, researchers, and patients, with a collective mission to enhance awareness and drive impactful change with SFs.
About Fondation Pierre Fabre
Since 1999, Fondation Pierre Fabre has been working towards enabling the population in the South to have better access to quality medicines and care. In 2020, the Foundation continues to combat inequalities in access to health care around the world through 35 programs in 21 countries. Pierre Fabre Foundation aims to enable populations in the least developed countries and those in emerging countries in the world, as well as populations exceptionally plunged into serious crisis situations of political, economic and/or natural origin, to access, both in quality and volume, care and more specifically commonly used medicines defined, in particular by the WHO, as essential to human health. Training drug specialists has always been a priority for the Foundation.
About the Italian Center for Coordinated Research in Precision Medicine and Chronic Inflammation at the University of Milan
Since December 2022, Dr. Giovanni Damiani, MD, PhD has been the President and Founder of CRC in Precision Medicine and Chronic Inflammation at the University of Milan. As one of the University of Milan’s Coordinating Research Centers (CRC), CRC in Precision Medicine and Chronic Inflammation coordinate activities across disciplines focusing on the tailored prescribing approach to ensure the best response while minimizing the possibility of experiencing side effects. The Center utilizes the acquisition of data representative of the general population (big data) and their processing (conventional statistics & machine learning) to recognize groups of patients (clusters) with clinical, demographic, social and biological characteristics capable of predicting the response to a given drug already at baseline.
About substandard and falsified medical products
The WHO defines falsified medicines as medicines that deliberately/fraudulently misrepresent their identity, composition or source. Nearly any type of pharmaceutical product can be and has been falsified: whether “lifestyle” medicines, including erectile dysfunction and weight loss medicines, or lifesaving medicines including those used to treat malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other life-threatening conditions. Manufacturers of fake medicines do not discriminate – fake medicines can be both long-established and recently marketed medicines, both branded and generic, and both domestically manufactured and imported.
