In response to a growing tide of fake and substandard medicines, many countries throughout the globe opened drug quality control labs and implemented more stringent drug quality monitoring programs. Yet most of these national efforts exist in isolation, which has led to data silos and little collaboration between neighboring nations. Now, in an effort to facilitate partnerships in the fight against ineffective medicines, anti-counterfeiterfeit campaigners last week rolled out a new public database listing quality measures on drugs sampled around the world.

The resource, launched by the non-profit, standards-setting organization United States Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) with backing from the US Agency for International Development, lists authenticity testing results for 8,700 drug samples to date, including key anti-malarials and anti-tuberculosis medications obtained from street vendors, pharmacies, stores and clinics worldwide. The database is freely accessible online, and contains critical quality data such as the time and location of drug sampling.

With the new database, “countries will be able to identify which drugs are being counterfeited in neighboring countries [and] be alerted of products of concern,” Patrick Lukulay, USP’s director of the Promoting the Quality of Medicines program, told Nature Medicine.

Marv Shepherd, president of the Virginia-based Partnership for Safe Medicines and author of an opinion piece published in this journal last year calling for greater international cooperation on counterfeits, applauds the new effort, but worries about how rigorous the testing and how biased the sampling of drug quality will be. “Random sampling of products is not an easy task,” he says.

For more about the fight on fakes, check out our April 2010 news focus on counterfeit drugs. And to learn more about new database, watch this video interview with USP’s Lukulay.