Blockchain and Drug Supply Assurance in the Coronavirus Era
Over the past two years, our team at LedgerDomain has been working on bringing the drug supply chain out of the digital dark ages and into a secure real-time mode with blockchain. With the rise of COVID-19, we’ve often been asked about stakeholder readiness in the pre-blockchain era and whether blockchain has a role to play.
COVID-19 didn’t emerge overnight, and everyone has moved quickly and early to fight its spread. We were in private meetings with many key stakeholders, including FDA’s drug shortage team, in early January, and they were already in uniform and ready to ship out.
As healthcare leaders and front-line workers rally together, we’re confident that everyone will ensure that the US public continues to live its best life. With that in mind, if therapeutics, test kits, vaccines, and ventilators were hashed to the blockchain, we could move from confidence to certainty.
Earlier this month, I spoke at the Hyperledger Global Forum and found a galvanizing spirit of cooperation to drive the longer-term solutions. We were approached by one-time rivals like Chris Moose of IBM and long-time friends like Brian Behlendorf of Linux Foundation and the GS1 team to seek common (and higher) ground.
From the need for improved public hygiene to more robust track-and-trace systems, we will emerge from COVID-19 with some hard-earned lessons. So let’s use this newfound interest in drug supply assurance to start a conversation. For a quick overview, see our two-minute video on the FDA pilot we did with UCLA Health:
For a deeper dive, our peer-reviewed journal article goes into agonizing detail about how UCLA interoperated directly with their friends at Biogen to rush lifesaving medicines to the babies that needed them.
In [the current supply chain world] it is typical for each transacting party to manage its own database systems: there is no shared global system of record representing the single source of truth describing the flow of items through the supply chain. Maintaining a private database allows each party to minimize the security threat surface to which they are exposed while maximizing internal data consistency, as a global relational database would require each party to trust all other parties in the supply chain with the integrity and security of their data.
However, a system in which each supply chain participant maintains their own system of record comes at the expense of the supply chain’s resilience to common attack vectors such as man-in-the-middle or spoofing, as each participant must be trusted to securely manage user privileges, authentication, and auditing. Perhaps more importantly, each participant must be trusted to not carry out malicious edits of data in their system of record to their own benefit. This makes it difficult for any single source of truth to be synthesized.
Without global and persistent visibility into the true state of the supply chain, duplicate “spoofed” counterfeit drugs cannot be identified; counterfeit or defective lots cannot be tracked, traced, and recovered; and malicious “men in the middle” cannot be identified by the signature transaction patterns they leave across multiple points in the supply chain. Distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain represent a potential system of record that would lessen the need to trade data integrity and privacy for global visibility and interpretability.
The need for real-time drug supply chain assurance has never been more pressing. By interoperating with traditional relational systems, our blockchain-backed solution enables caregivers to make sure that medicines are unexpired and genuine, all in real time on their iPhone.
Stay safe, wash your hands, and take care of yourselves!
Ben Taylor
CEO, LedgerDomain
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