TraceLink relocates to new offices as employment more than doubles

TraceLink, one of the leading software developers for providing track-and-trace compliance for the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), is moving to new headquarters in North Reading, MA. That, in itself, isn’t big news, but the company is moving to support what it says is a 127% staff growth in 2014, and an expected 150% growth this year. Revenue for the privately held company was up 137% last year; now over 100 life science companies and service providers are employing its cloud-based Product Track, ServiceLink and related data-exchange IT solutions.

Last month, the company announced a $20-million investment by its original funder, FirstMark Capital, now joined by Volition Capital and Fidelity BioSciences. While the implementation of DSCSA, with manufacturers and trading partners required to exchange certain transaction information by May 1, has opened up the long-pent-up US market, TraceLink has been active in similar supply-chain traceability activities globally. “More than 40 countries around the world have instituted regulations that will protect 75-80% of global medicines from drug counterfeiting by 2018,” said Shabbir Dahod, CEO. “This transformation has fueled our record financial and staff growth over the past two years, and we expect our business to continue to grow.”

Dahod and other TraceLink founders have a long history in the drug traceability arena; he was one of the founders of SupplyScape, an early developer of what was then called “e-pedigree” drug tracking systems. Dahod left SupplyScape in 2009 (after California and the federal FDA deferred instituting mandatory drug-tracking programs) to found TraceLink, but with a goal this time of not developing and selling software, but employing cloud-based solutions for data exchange among manufacturers and their contractors. (Subsequently, TraceLink purchased SupplyScape’s assets and continued to support the e-pedigree programs in place.) DSCSA sets a timetable, eventually for drug shipments to be tracked at the unit level, from point of manufacture to point of dispensing, by 2023; some pharma companies are already working on their unit-level systems, which also require packaging-line changes as well as the data-exchange capability.