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By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss
NEW YORK, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Some of the industry's largest
pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer Inc and Eli
Lilly and Co, have developed a blockchain-based system
to track prescription drugs across the supply chain to better
halt the flow of counterfeit medicines, company officials said
on Friday.
Some two dozen companies in the industry including
drugmakers, distributors, retailers and delivery firms created
the blockchain-based MediLedger Network, which it has been
testing in the verification of drug returns. They said they
intend to further expand the system this year.
Blockchain, which first emerged as the technology underlying
virtual currency bitcoin, is a shared database maintained by a
network of computers.
The MediLedger group submitted a report to the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration laying out the benefits of blockchain for
this specific issue, Susanne Somerville, chief executive officer
at technology company Chronicled, told Reuters.
Chronicled is MediLedger's custodian, providing
administration of the network.
"Even though the drug supply in the United States is safe,
there are small percentages ... of potential counterfeit drugs.
Certainly, there's a lot of evidence of diverted drugs,"
Somerville told Reuters in an interview.
She said counterfeit drugs are a big problem in third world
countries, where it is estimated that half of their drugs are
counterfeit. "This is a plan intended that this never happens in
this country."
Among the 24 participating companies are Amgen Inc,
FedEx Corp, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Novartis
, AmerisourceBergen Corp, Sanofi,
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc and Walmart Inc.
Medicines identified as counterfeit may be contaminated,
contain the wrong ingredient, or have no active ingredient at
all. There have been instances in the past of counterfeit cancer
drugs flooding the market, for example.
The World Health Organization estimates that counterfeit
medicines worth 73 billion euros ($79.26 billion) are traded
annually.
"The current point-to-point systems infrastructure lacks the
ability to keep data in sync across the healthcare supply chain,
which ultimately increases the risk of counterfeit, diverted or
otherwise illegitimate products," David Vershure, head of
channel and contract management for Roche's Genentech
unit, said in a statement.
The core function of the MediLedger Network is to validate
the authenticity of drug identifiers throughout the supply
chain, the MediLedger report said. This can all be done without
any proprietary data being shared openly on the blockchain or
ever leaving a company's control.
The MediLedger project was created in response to the FDA's
call early last year for pilot projects testing an electronic
inter-operable system as outlined in the Drug Supply Chain
Security Act (DSCSA).
($1 = 0.9210 euros)
(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss
Editing by Bill Berkrot)
