Effects Evaluation of UHF RFID Systems on the Molecular Structure of Biological Drugs

The growing counterfeiting problem and the significant fragmentation of the pharmaceutical market are resulting on an increase of difficulty to trace medicines. In these scenarios, where an item-level traceability is crucial, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology holds the promise to eliminate many of the previous problems. Unfortunately, there are still some technical and economic barriers that are retarding the deployment of these innovative technologies in large-scale application scenarios. For the pharmaceutical supply chain, there have been concerns raised regarding the potential effects on the quality of drugs due to exposure to electromagnetic fields. In this paper, some results, obtained by a recent experimental study focused on the evaluation of potential effects on biological drugs, have been reported. This work aimed to evaluate potential effects of tracing RFID systems on the molecular structure of biological drugs. In particular, some samples of a commercial human insulin preparation have been exposed for different periods to electromagnetic fields generated by RFID devices. In order to evaluate possible alterations on the molecular structure, the following diagnostic techniques have been used: High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). The experimental results have shown that the electromagnetic field generated by UHF RFID readers does not cause any damage on the structure of the insulin molecule.