Fighting Counterfeit Drugs In The U.S. Using Blockchain Technology

• A blockchain-based solution called the MediLedger to secure the supply chain of medical drugs.
• The effort has been put together by major pharma-corporations, including Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, Amerisourcebergen, Amgen, FedEx, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Gilead Sciences, Eli Lily, Walgreens Boots Alliance, and Walmart.
• The project is now under review of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S. for a pilot run to check the feasibility of the venture.

Over two dozen companies in the healthcare industry, including pharmaceutical giants, drug distributors, drug retailers, and drug delivery companies, have come together in a working group, with a blockchain-based solution called the MediLedger to secure the supply chain of medical drugs. The effort has been put together by major pharma-corporations, including Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, Amerisourcebergen, Amgen, FedEx, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Gilead Sciences, Eli Lily, Walgreens Boots Alliance, and Walmart. The project is now under review of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S. for a pilot run to check the feasibility of the venture.

Blockchain Clampdown on counterfeit medicines

The blockchain technology used in the project was built by a small company called Chronicled in 2018. Chronicled will run the administration and technical management of the MediLedger network. Blockchain technology works by having a distributed ledger on which legitimate transactions of some form of data are stored on a “block” and then secured with a cryptographic hash and then chained to the next block.

This combination of a very tough-to-crack cryptographic hash and the chaining of blocks makes blockchain technology highly immutable. Additionally, the entire ledger is also decentralized across nodes all over the network, thus making manipulation highly impossible. This combination of security, transparency, and efficiency of data transfer is what makes blockchain technology the innovative solution to a multitude of problems we have today.

Blockchain technology was first debuted with the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, where transactions were secured on the Bitcoin blockchain. Since then, the technology has come a long way with several applications from the vehicle-to-vehicle communication in the automobile industry to producing sustainable, green energy in the renewable energy sector.

MediLedger technology to solve the counterfeit drug problem 

The medical drug supply industry is worth $1 trillion in value, and nearly $73 billion worth of counterfeit drugs are dealt with in the market every year. Medicines are labeled as counterfeit when they have no active ingredient, the wrong ingredient, or possess contaminants that deter the function of the drug. Even though the counterfeit drug problem is small in the United States, third world countries have nearly half the circulating drugs to be incorrectly produced. The MediLedger technology, if approved, hopes to circumvent this problem by introducing a more secure drug supply network where counterfeit drugs can no longer be supplied.

Parth Vig