The days of fake whiskey could be numbered, thanks to a team of biomedical engineers from Purdue University and South Korea. The team, led by Young Kim, associate head for research and an associate professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, has developed an QR code on an edible silk tag that manufacturers can place in bottles of whiskey. Consumers can use a smartphone app to confirm the whiskey’s authenticity. Credit: Purdue University photo/John Underwood
The days of fake whiskey could be numbered, thanks to a team of biomedical engineers from Purdue University and South Korea. The team, led by Young Kim, associate head for research and an associate professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, has developed an QR code on an edible silk tag that manufacturers can place in bottles of whiskey. Consumers can use a smartphone app to confirm the whiskey’s authenticity. Credit: Purdue University photo/John Underwood

Biomedical engineers from Purdue University and the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences in South Korea have developed a fluorescent silk tag with a QR code that is edible and safe to consume, as a security measure to help authenticate pharmaceutical products, medicines and high-value goods such as alcoholic spirits. The silk tag can be scanned by a smartphone to assess the liquid’s authenticity, and does not affect the taste of the contents.

 

The edible code, which cannot be seen by the naked eye, is made from fluorescent silk proteins to provide an additional authentication mechanism for marked safety seals on bottles. It can serialize, track and trace, and authenticate each medicine at the dosage level, thus combating the issue of illegal pharmaceuticals and enhance patient safety.

 

Child deaths due to counterfeit malaria and pneumonia medicines, for instance, is a major global problem for the pharmaceuticals industry. Although some regulatory measures have been implemented to tackle the issue, these implement safety features in secondary packaging, not the individual unit. This new anticounterfeiting technology will therefore empower patients as it allows them to verify their own medicines.

 

As reported in the journal ACS Central Science [Leem et al. ACS Cent. Sci. (2022) DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.1c01233], the team looked first at whiskey due to its high alcohol content, and as applying silk proteins to alcohol makes them more durable, the tag’s shape lasts for longer. The tags were made by processing fluorescent silk cocoons from specialized silkworms to develop a biopolymer that can be formed into patterns to encode information. When the tags were tested in a range of whiskeys over a 10-month period, they were shown to still be activated using a smartphone app, which extracts a digitized security key in different light settings.

 

Unlike ordinary QR codes, this code has the unique features of being edible, imperceptible and multidimensional. As researcher Young Kim told Materials Today, “On-dose (or in-dose) authentication means that a security measure is integrated with the dosage form itself, offering product verification and traceability embedded into each medicine.”

 

The matrix code generates a security key that is augmented by a deep neural network and a cryptographic hash function, security technologies that could also be used for other security and cryptographic applications that need obliteration immediately after being scanned. The study will help to increase awareness of this healthcare problem, and the researchers are looking for industrial collaborations and partnerships to scale up the technology.

“On-dose (or in-dose) authentication means that a security measure is integrated with the dosage form itself, offering product verification and traceability embedded into each medicine.”Young Kim