Faegre Drinker Advises ASOP Global Foundation on Launch of Rx Watchdog Platform Monitoring Unsafe Online Pharmaceutical Sales

Faegre Drinker partner Libby Baney Burstein and Faegre Drinker Consulting director Nisha Quasba advised the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP Global) Foundation, who partnered with S-3 Research, in the launch of Rx Watchdog, a public health monitoring platform aimed at providing consumers a look into how prescription medicines, investigational new drugs, and emerging unapproved molecules are offered for sale from potentially noncompliant sources across websites and social media platforms.

The tool tracks how pharmaceutical products are advertised, promoted and offered for sale online. It does not measure completed transactions, sales volume or patient harm, and it does not identify individual purchasers. Using Rx Watchdog, the ASOP Global Foundation will issue quarterly reports to support research, public education and engagement with policymakers, regulators, law enforcement and other stakeholders working to protect patients from unsafe online medicine sales.

“Consumer-focused tools like Rx Watchdog have been sorely lacking in the public health and pharmaceutical industries for far too long, which has led to the prevalence of unapproved products from unsafe sources in the online marketplace” Baney, who also serves as senior advisor for the ASOP Global Foundation, said. “Rx Watchdog will help fill the informational gap for patients and regulators, which will in turn lead to a safer, more equitable public market for these sorts of critical medicines.”

The launch of Rx Watchdog comes on the heels of the ASOP Global Foundation’s 2025 U.S. Consumer Behavior Survey, which found that 38% of U.S. adults have purchased prescription medicines online, with nearly three-quarters of those purchasers, 73%, beginning to do so within the previous three years. At the same time, 51% falsely believe that only safe, verified sellers appear on the first page of search results. Among people who reported taking GLP-1 medications, 25% said they had purchased GLP-1s online.

ASOP Global Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable, nonprofit organization dedicated to addressing the growing public health threat of illegal online drug sellers, concentrating its activities on research and education to inform consumers and policymakers.

S-3 Research is a small business and registered federal contractor specializing in large-scale social media and internet monitoring, artificial intelligence, multimodal analytics, web forensics, digital public health surveillance, and custom intelligence solutions. S-3 was originally established through a challenge.gov award and has provided data science and professional services for several government agencies, private companies, and nonprofit organizations.