In the pharmaceutical industry, legal regulations (EU del. VO. 2016/161) in many countries define every prescription drug with 2D matrix codes. Marking with a 2D code, which includes the item number, batch, expiry date and serial number, serves to protect prescription-only medicines against counterfeiting.
Some of these are large quantities and some are small quantities of highly specialized products. The data must be made available in the database by the manufacturer and the serial number of the medicinal product is checked against the database when it is given to the patient. If a serial number does not exist or has already been sold out, there is a counterfeit alert. The aim is to prevent the intrusion of counterfeits into the legal supply chain and, in case of an incident, to quickly detect them in order to prevent damage to the patient.