Editor’s note: Joe Magno is Executive Director, the North Carolina Center of Innovation Network, which is a partner with WRAL TechWire.

GREENSBORO, N.C. – Securitization of supply chains, authentication of products, and preventing counterfeiting have challenged businesses for centuries. The problems continue to become more daunting as globalization and transfer of goods and products becomes more complex. The tools and techniques of nanotechnology and biotechnology are beginning to provide some answers to these challenges.

Imagine being able to track a product and truly validate its authenticity from raw material to finished product and from its manufacturer through distribution to its final destination. Bar coding, radio frequency identification, and other methods have proven to be helpful in many situations, but what about other, more critical products such as pharmaceuticals and military weapons and systems? For example, the Defense Logistics Agency.

The Defense Logistics Agency supports more than 2,430 weapon systems, processes 100,000 daily requisitions and manages nearly 5.3 million items over nine supply chains. A counterfeit part whether a microcomputer chip or a bolt in a weapons system can have deadly results.

In a recent interview with Military Imbedded Systems magazine, Lee Mathiesen, Operations Manager, at Lansdale Semiconductor stated there were three kinds of counterfeits:

  • The wrong part in the right packaged refurbished to “look” like the part. These don’t work when put in the system so the only real loss is the procurement cost.
  • Product pulled from [electronic] waste that is the correct function, but is refurbished and marked to reflect a different date code, part number, screening level, etc. These are dangerous because they may work at room temp at least for a short time. They always fail at the worst possible moment and may cause a loss of the system and mission.
  • These are the parts that are new, look, and act just like the originals, but they may be tainted to fail or disrupt operation. These include the clones that have been surfacing lately, which begs the question… what organization of counterfeiters can afford to reverse engineer and fabricate these parts? How can they expect to compete with the OCM manufacturer who has amortized the engineering cost over hundreds of thousands of parts? Who is paying for the overhead? A nation state perhaps?

Applied DNA Sciences, Inc. (Applied DNA) (NASDAQ: APDN), a provider of DNA-based supply chain, anti-counterfeiting and anti-theft technology, product genotyping and product authentication solutions, announced today that the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) has awarded the company a third contract to provide its tracking and authentication services. Their patented technology uses modified plant DNA to provide forensic level tracking of materials to protect supply chains across numerous industries.

“Together these contracts have strengthened our core capabilities to offer supply chain solutions across an expanded range of critical commodities,” said Dr. James A. Hayward, President and CEO of Applied DNA. “These parts and assemblies are used in defense, industrial and consumer markets”.

Vice Admiral Ed Straw, USN (Ret) stated, “I often got asked, Admiral what keeps you awake at night? The answer was pretty simple. Aircraft fasteners.  The nuts and bolts that held components onto airplanes.  Such as wingbolts. Now there were no wings that fell off during my tenure fortunately. But there were numerous aircraft groundings as a result of faulty bolts, poorly manufactured bolts and in some cases counterfeit bolts. There are over 4 million repair parts in the 100 billion dollar inventory in the defense supply chain, and inspecting everything to the 100% level was not practical.  So a technology solution was needed, and it’s there today.”

Applied DNA has been working with COIN since 2013 and has numerous customers in North Carolina as their technology is applicable to many other industries native to the State including textiles, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and aviation. For more information on Applied DNA go to www.adnas.com .

About the author: Joe Magno is currently serving as the Executive Director of the North Carolina Center of Innovation Network and also as a NC Works Commission Board member. His insights and thoughts on economic development are the result of his varied experiences and successes an entrepreneur, executive and economic developer. He has advised both corporate and government leadership in structuring large and successful economic development programs.