Dr Reddy's Laboratories has been awarded the prestigious 'WorldStar 2003 Award' from the 'World Packaging Organization', for the Anti-counterfeit packaging design for Omez capsules.

Omez (omeprazole) is one of Dr. Reddy's leading pharmaceutical brands and is marketed in India and in other countries such as Russia.

The WorldStar 2003 awards ceremony was held on May 13, 2004 at Basel, Switzerland. This year, Dr. Reddy's was the only pharmaceutical company to get an award for anticounterfeit features.

Satish Reddy, Managing Director & Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Reddy's said, "It is a significant achievement for us in our effort to ensure the availability of safe and high quality medicines. Counterfeit medicine put the lives of millions of patients at risk. Innovative packaging such as this will help to contain this problem thus saving the health and life of patients."

The Omez capsules pack is exclusive with combination of many overt and covert anti-counterfeit features, making the pack difficult to copy. The Omez pack addresses counterfeiting problems through these unique features. Primary pack features include: (1) embossing of the brand name, (2) ink jet coding of batch details and (3) circular printing on capsule shells. Secondary Pack features include: (1) using 'macromedia freehand' developed unique invisible matrix containing a photo graph on the side panel and brand name 'OMEZ' in the gray band on the front panel of carton which can be seen only with a matching film screen (HYSEP) and cannot be scanned or photo copied and (2) Coin reactive printing.

The judges met in October 2003 at Cairo, Egypt, representing the member packaging institutes of the World Packaging Organisation, the International Packaging Press Organisation and the International Association of Packaging Research Institutes. WorldStars are presented only to those packages which, having already won recognition in a national competition, are compared by an expert panel of judges to similar packages from around the world. In the 2003 WorldStar, packages from 34 countries were judged and 143 packages were awarded prizes.

The World Packaging Organisation instituted these awards in 1970. Last year, the company's 'promotional pack of Nise ' was selected for the WorldStar 2002 award for design excellence.