School of Management student Adebayo Alonge had just finished high school when he was diagnosed with COPD–chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Alonge was living in Lagos, Nigeria, and struggled with severe asthma symptoms, including large amounts of fluid in his lungs. During his treatment, he relied on medication from a local pharmacy, but his symptoms kept deteriorating. “At one point I just stopped breathing,” Alonge says. “They had to do resuscitation.” Soon after, Alonge began buying his medication direct from London. He improved rapidly. “It was the same medication,” he says, “but very different quality.”

This experience would shape Alonge’s career, leading him first into pharmacy and stints with both Swipha (formerly Roche Nigeria) and BASF in Africa, and later to start a company, RxAll, dedicated to creating safe, reliable pipelines of high-quality drugs in Africa. His cofounder, Ankur Kapadia, is in the School of Management’s MBA for Executives program and has an extensive background in healthcare technology.

The team was the second admitted into the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute’s Global Social Venture Creation Program (VCP), receiving $2,200 in support from InnovateHealth Yale in addition to the $1,000 given to VCP teams by YEI. The program provides education, mentorship and guidance for early-stage teams looking to develop their ventures. They were also recently a finalist for InnovateHealth Yale’s Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health or Education.

“RxAll has developed a compelling way to tackle the very serious global problem of counterfeit medications,” says Martin Klein, Director of InnovateHealth Yale and Associate Dean for Development and External Affairs at Yale School of Public Health.

According to the World Health Organization, 100,000 Africans die each year from counterfeit medications, such as poor quality antimalarial drugs; and counterfeit medicines represent 30% of all medicines distributed in Africa. RxAll would combat this problem by creating a secure pipeline with a verification process from drug ordering to patient purchase. “We can create this secure drug pipeline and verification system for local pharmacies to buy directly from manufacturers,” Alonge says. “Using their smartphones, patients can pass a ray of light through an attached accessory on the drugs they want to buy. Their phones will then tell them whether it is an original pack.”

The startup has completed a market study in Nigeria speaking to 50 pharmacists who have indicated a strong interest in buying from a secure online-based pipeline instead of the open market. They are also speaking to the Food and Drug Administration and looking to connect with a materials scientist at Yale to optimize the technology used to verify the drugs. They plan to begin with the region’s most common medications—antimalarials, antibiotics and chronic diabetes medications.

Money from the Global Social Venture Creation Program will help to support a pilot test of the ordering platform in Nigeria. “We want to see how many pharmacies would convert to the platform and get metrics around acquisition and cost,” Alonge says. They are also doing a second-stage market study, talking to local manufacturers, pharmacies and users.

It’s a personal mission for Alonge as well as a professional one. By creating a secure drug pipeline, he can directly impact lives in his home country and prevent needless suffering due to counterfeit drugs.

“This team is motivated to make an impact,” says Jim Boyle, Managing Director of YEI. “They are continuing to build their business case and have made terrific progress in creating a new platform that pharmacies in Africa want to use.”

http://yei.yale.edu/yale-startup-rxall-wants-create-secure-drug-pipeline-africa