Blockchain for Pharma – Opportunities and Challenges

As someone who has been writing about these topics since graduating from university, it is strange how concepts such as the pharmaceutical supply chain and brands such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca have become household utterances due to the COVID-19 crisis.

However, the increased exposure of this industry has led governments and brands to finally start thinking seriously about how we can make these supply chains more efficient, so we never see the delays getting critical medicine and PPE that we saw in the first half of 2020.

As the technology which underpins cryptocurrencies, blockchain has immense potential to transform the world of pharmaceutical supply chains and make them more efficient, transparent, and secure than ever before.

Vaccines

One of the challenges which came out of the COVID-19 crisis was the need for vaccines – in particular, the Pfizer one – to be stored at a consistently low temperature. With vaccine manufacturing plants being situated all over the planet, it was often necessary for shipments to pass through several shippers and handlers on their journeys to healthcare providers.

Manual logging and recording processes for these shipments are outdated and vulnerable to human error, but blockchain has a solution. With IoT enabled temperature sensors within the shipments themselves, data can be transmitted and recorded on an hour-by-hour basis. And, thanks to the secure public ledger technology provided by blockchain, it becomes a simple matter to analyse the entire journey of a shipment and any temperature excursions or discrepancies can instantly be identified and traced to the exact point of the journey in which they occurred.

Counterfeits

Another challenge with global pharma supply chains is the danger of counterfeit medicines being introduced at any point. Counterfeit medicine can pose significant dangers, not only to the reputation and profitability of the company whose shipment gets infiltrated, but the very health and lives of the patients at the other end of the supply chain.

Once again, blockchain’s ledger system can provide a solution by making sure shipments stay secure and that no containers are opened. If they are, the secure public ledger comes to the rescue once again and provides all the data required to trace the breach. If a particular link in the supply chain consistently allows security breaches to occur (or indeed temperature incursions as discussed above) the other stakeholders in the chain can either work with that organisation to improve its standards and performance or seek an alternative partner.

UNICEF recently tendered the development of a blockchain solution for detecting counterfeit COVID-19 vaccines. This will allow COVID-19 vaccines to be scanned and verified so their serial number can be compared with a blockchain-secured list of product codes generated by the manufacturers. The risk of fake COVID vaccines is far higher in poorer parts of the world where access to medicine is low and infection rates are high, with fake vaccines in Uganda [for example] selling for between $34 and $163. It is hoped that solutions such as the one tendered by UNICEF will help solve these challenges to the vaccine rollout program in these regions.

Final Thoughts

Blockchain does indeed present great opportunities for improving the security and reliability of pharmaceutical supply chains and, should a crisis similar to the COVID-19 pandemic arise in the future – will likely help us formulate a more effective response.

Blockchain implementation requires significant investment to become effective however and will require pharmaceutical brands, logistics providers, and government agencies commit to serious collaboration to make it work.