Aegate appoints new CEO after departure of Gary Noon

Pharmaceutical authentication specialist Aegate has appointed Michael Peace as its new chief executive following the departure of former CEO Gary Noon after more than six years in the role.

The change at the helm of Aegate comes as the company is consolidating its position in the point-of-dispensing authentication sector in Europe, with is system now used by 90 per cent of pharmacists in Italy, 88 per cent in Belgium and 85 per cent in Greece, representing around a quarter of all 160,000 pharmacists in the EU.

Peace joins Aegate from Thomson Reuters, where he was most recently Head of Asia for the company's financial markets division. Previously he held positions senior positions in Reuters and was chief executive of mutual fund company Lipper, which was acquired by Reuters in 1999.

While Peace does not have a significant heritage in pharma, Aegate has also boosted that side of its management team with the appointment of Dr. Richard Barker OBE as a senior advisor.

Barker was formerly director general of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), served on the board of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) and is currently director of the Centre for Accelerating Medical Innovations.

Sir David Cooksey, chairman of Aegate said: "Michael's experience of building teams and businesses across multiple geographies and Richard’s substantial pharmaceutical industry expertise will be invaluable, now that new European Legislation for falsified medicines has made it clear that patient safety systems such as Aegate's are going to become a legal requirement."
 
The new legislation will require the pharmaceutical industry to uniquely barcode each box of medicine such that they can be checked by pharmacists at the time of dispensing, using authentication software, to confirm the item is not recalled or falsified.

As a result all pharmacies in Europe will need to install point of dispensing authentication software systems within the next three to five years, according to Aegate.

Such systems also help avert the threat of counterfeit medicines entering the supply chain, said the company, adding that European Commission estimates that the incidence of fake drugs is rising at around 10-20 per cent a year.

Aegate says that in 2010 its systems informed pharmacists of 48,571 individual packs that were recalled and 8,820 packs that were soon to expire or had expired.