A decentralized application for the traceability process in the pharma industry

Abstract

With the growth of a global market, new regulations aiming at preventing the fraud of counterfeiting drugs have been released all over the world. In the pharma industry, an innovative technology named serialization is becoming more and more popular as it allows to implement a packaging process based on a hierarchical aggregation. This guarantees that each box entering in the distribution network is marked with a unique identifier for an easy traceability by a central regulatory in charge to follow the life cycle of the product until given to the final patient. In this scenario, the blockchain might offer a breakthrough proposing a decentralized and immutable traceability mechanism able to increase the security of the data and to reduce the success of a fraud attempt. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this technology, in this paper, a DAPP based on the Ethereum blockchain has been coded and tested as prototype in a pharma industry.