The global market for falsified medicines currently stands at 200 billion dollars, with an average annual growth of 20%, twice the rate of the legitimate pharmaceutical market.
In developing countries, it is estimated that 1 in 10 medical products are of poor quality or falsified. In 2012, in the United States, the FDA issued an international alert regarding the sale of fake versions of Avastin, a drug used to combat cancer. At least 35,000 virtual pharmacies have emerged in the last decade, offering a quantity of drugs to the general public far beyond the reach of any government control.
In this scenario, many companies have looked for the development of blockchain solutions to increase safety in the distribution of medicines around the world thanks to their imputability, traceability, transparency and safety. This becomes even more important in the case of imported products, which travel thousands of kilometers to reach their final consumer.
In addition to the risk of diversion and substitution by falsified drugs, conditioning with varying temperature in the distribution can simply cancel out the effectiveness of many vaccines and medications, without there being much room for control from hospitals and medical clinics.
Therefore, being able to track and verify the environmental conditions of storage and distribution of certain drugs is essential for enabling hospitals and doctors to dispose of products that are no longer good consumption. Similarly, knowing with certainty the origin of a drug is very important for users anywhere in the world.
Blockchain solutions that rely on transparency can solve many of these problems. The cryptography of the network makes it impossible to falsify the medicines in a package, which may be associated with embedded sensors that measure and store a history of inviolable data on the conditions of temperature, pressure, humidity etc of the product during all stages of distribution. This is the case of Modum or the MediLedger Project, created by a group of companies that include Pfizer and Genentech.
The possibilities, however, are far from being exhausted. Indeed, blockchain solutions for health-related issues began to be developed quite late, with significant growth starting from 2016.
Applications go far beyond traceability in distribution chains of drugs. The sharing of patients’ digital data, asset management of medical equipment and even global networks for organ donation and transplantation have been the subject of attention by many companies and developers around the world.
Although most of these initiatives are aimed at the profit of large companies, with few of them focused on poor or vulnerable people, millions of people should directly benefit from the blockchain solutions for health in the coming years. The potential for solving many people’s problems is in place. It is the duty of society to direct resources towards solutions that benefit as many people as possible.
