Medicines falcification in the pharmaceutical sector
Medicines falcification is one of the biggest problem in the pharmaceutical sector. Below are some information stated by the Health Research Funding Organisation: Internet sales of counterfeit drugs account for $75 billion of the total market; About 60 different Pfizer medicines and products were being counterfeited around the world as of 2014; WHO estimates that 16% of counterfeit drugs contain the wrong ingredients, while 17% contain the wrong levels of necessarily ingredients.
The biggest issue with fake drugs isn’t that they are falcificated but rather that they can be very different from the authentic product in a quantitative and qualitative way. Indeed, many of them do not contain the active ingredients they are expected to. This can be dangerous for the patients that take the counterfeit medicines since it won’t treat the disease. Moreover, if the ingredients and the dosages are different, the product can launch unexpected secondary effects that can lead to unpredictable conditions. As strongly underlined by Anca PETRE, Healthcare Market Analyst at Humaniq, security is the main advantage of the blockchain technology for drug traceability. Each new transaction added to a block is unalterable and time stamped, making it easy to track a product and secure that the information cannot be modified.
A blockchain can be either private or public. To insure the origin and traceability of the drugs, the companies that register a product on the blockchain must be trustable. Consequently, only private blockchains controlled by a central entity are logical to make sure that fake drugs are not registered. A company’s access to the “drug blockchain” would therefore be a proof that the drugs they produce are authentic.Anca PETRE states:” The pharmaceutical companies decide which actors of the supply chain act as miners. It could be manufacturers, distributors or retailers. Depending on the position on the supply chain, each person could have different rights: labs can register drugs whilst wholesalers can only verify transactions. “When a drug is produced, a block is created that holds all the relative information about the product. Each time the drug moves from one entity to another, the information is registered on the blockchain, making it easy to track the product.
One of the main problematic today, is the absence of harmony between the systems used to track drugs, and usually, stakeholders on the supply chain have a narrow vision of the origin and destination of the products they receive. In addition, if a problem is detected and a batch has to be withdrawn from the market, blockchain technologies make it simple for the company to find their products and get around complications.
