Winter 2015 - Plasma

Leading Innovation and Supply Chain Safety

Shabbir Dahod, CEO of Tracelink Inc., is spearheading a platform to meet the requirements of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act.

MAY 1, 2015, will mark a turning point in pharmaceutical supply chain security. With the phase-one implementation of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), buyers and sellers of drug products will now be required to provide transactional data that will identify and trace drugs as they are distributed. (Enforcement of phase one of the DSCSA, originally scheduled for Jan. 1, was delayed until May 1.) Over a 10- year enactment period, the new law aims to ensure safe and efficient access to legitimate drugs, reduce the threat of counterfeits and facilitate more effective recalls down to the individual package level. A quick Google search of DSCSA provides numerous U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tutorials on the law’s various phases and specifications, but search engines also consistently point to one trusted compliance solution provider: TraceLink.com.

As president and CEO of TraceLink, Inc., Shabbir Dahod leads a visionary team tasked with helping companies of all sizes meet the complex requirements of the DSCSA regulations. The law provides a national policy for combatting counterfeiting, theft and diversion in the pharmaceutical supply chain, and for a young company, TraceLink has quickly positioned itself as the go-to solution platform for end-to-end compliance. According to Dahod, the company’s remarkable climb has been the result of innovative technology coupled with a well-defined vision and mission. “Although our company is five years old, the mission established by our core team began over a decade ago,” explains Dahod. “There were 15 of us in a room discussing what we wanted this company to stand for. The vision was about building an integrated platform that would enable companies to share information, but the main focus, the human mission, was to protect patients from adulterated or counterfeit drugs.”

Dahod says TraceLink employs a “people first” business philosophy that promotes transparency as one of its core values: “We are in the intellectual property business, and for me, people always come first. I look to hire the finest people and then give them operational transparency so they have access to the information they need to do their day-to-day jobs. Quality leadership comes down to this: You communicate the goals, cast the vision, create transparency and let people execute the vision to the best of their ability.”

Compliance in the Cloud

Life Sciences Cloud, TraceLink’s celebrated technology platform, enables manufacturers, wholesalers and pharmacies to instantly link to tens of thousands of trading partners. Built on the Amazon Web Services global cloud infrastructure, the cloud delivers on its promise to provide DSCSA compliance for all tracing, verification and serialization requirements. A single connection establishes compliance for the largest pharmaceutical company or the smallest pharmacy across all supplier and trading partner relationships. The innovative platform has been chosen by thousands of companies across the pharmaceutical supply chain, including FFF Enterprises, Inc., the nation’s largest distributor of plasma products, vaccines and critical-care biopharmaceuticals. Companies like FFF have partnered with TraceLink to help streamline the compliance process and maintain uncompromised standards of patient safety and supply chain security. The platform has already been the recipient of numerous industry awards, including the Amazon AWS Global Start-Up Challenge grand prize and the Edison Award for innovation in health management. TraceLink’s Life Sciences Cloud is already being used on a global scale to fight drug counterfeiting, protect product quality and reduce operational costs.

“We’ve delivered the only mature, field-tested platform that demonstrably minimizes the cost, risk and time involved in meeting DSCSA requirements,” says Dahod. “The level of scale and complexity with track-and-trace regulations is high. Until recently, much of the supply network had been relying on paper transactions. The task at hand is to move the entire industry toward more efficient uses of technology.”

The Road to Global Success

Throughout his 30-year career, Dahod has led innovation in the arenas of technology, business and management. While working at Layered Inc., he made a name for himself by developing an accounting package for the emerging Macintosh and Windows platforms. Later, he took a leap of faith and joined lead investor Paul Allen at his startup Asymetrix, establishing the company as a leader in multimedia authoring technology for computer-based learning. Dahod went on from there to lead collaboration and knowledge management initiatives at Microsoft. His career path led to several other successful start-ups, culminating in the 2003 founding of SupplyScape Corp., a leader in software solutions to safeguard the pharmaceutical supply chain. That company would provide the infrastructure that would later become TraceLink, Inc. With so many career milestones behind him, Dahod doesn’t hesitate to say that it is his current endeavor that brings him the greatest sense of accomplishment. “I’ve been in the industry for 30 years and done everything from authoring applications to dealing with database modeling, but I think TraceLink is the achievement I’m most proud of,” he says. “I feel like the human mission is really powerful — every day we know that what we are doing is going to save lives. If we are going to prosper as a society, we need to have established safety standards when it comes to the products we are consuming. I feel honored to be involved with a company that promotes both safety and innovation.”

While much of TraceLink’s early efforts focused on meeting the new U.S. track-and-trace requirements, the company’s leading-edge technology is already leaving a significant global footprint. Looking to the future, Dahod sees TraceLink expanding throughout Europe and beyond; expansion plans are already underway in India and Brazil, with future collaborations planned in Korea, China, Singapore, Japan and Argentina. “We want to leverage this platform to drive greater efficiency within the industry,” he says. “It will take significant effort, but once you are there, the opportunities are numerous.”

Collaborative Leadership

According to Dahod, one of the biggest challenges during any innovation or growth phase happens internally. “You have to constantly shift and reinvent the idea, and doing so can take a toll on the team,” he explains. During the initial phases of creating the TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud, for example, Dahod says he and his team met monthly to reevaluate what they’d learned and then assess what they were going to do with that knowledge. “I’m sure the team was wondering if I really knew where the product was going, and the answer at the time was no, I didn’t,” he says. “However, each change was methodical and based on actual input from test cases that we were running in the marketplace.”

It is this type of collaborative leadership style that has driven Dahod’s track record of success; the strength of his company’s executive team speaks volumes about his own “lead by example” management style. For Dahod, the basic definition of leadership comes down to two words: vision and trust. He asserts that as a leader, you have to provide vision both to your customers and to the industry as a whole. Then, he explains, it is essential to build trust, whether it’s with constituents, regulators or customers. “You conduct yourself with high levels of integrity and work very hard to implement the vision. You have to communicate honestly and openly at all times — we have to demonstrate leadership and then have the courage to lead.”

Trudie Mitschang
Trudie Mitschang is a contributing writer for BioSupply Trends Quarterly magazine.