India trusts Blockchain to chart vaccine supply chain

According to the Times of India, a former Cisco employee named Siddharth Chakravarty wants to use Blockchain technology for the vaccine supply chain around the world.

Weakened vaccines before delivery

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) report worrying information about the health status of children around the world: in 2018 alone, 20 million children have not been vaccinated against recurrent diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus or measles.

The main reason for this deprivation is the inefficiency of the transport of the vaccines, which would cause a deterioration of the products before their delivery to the final destination.

Certainly, specialists in the pharmaceutical industry have already put in place procedures to identify this problem, through data loggers that retrace the temperature oscillations via colored indicators.

However, companies can not accurately determine the spatio-temporal setting in which temperature changes have occurred, hence the inefficiency of this approach.

And yet, UNICEF and WHO have hailed the achievements of 2010, when 86 percent of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis were eradicated, tripling the number of vaccines dispensed and injected. The result would be more convincing if this rate reached 95%.

Blockchain to the rescue of the pharmaceutical industry

Given the magnitude of the situation, Chakravarty has designed the startup StaTwig, which is a solution based on the Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT), which will closely monitor the supply chain from the factory to medical centers.

Thus, pharmaceutical companies will be able to guarantee the authenticity of their products, and will easily ban counterfeit vaccines from the market.

The project designer states:

"They are not only able to track their shipment and know when it was delivered, but the solution also helps them predict when their next order will be placed."

In the same perspective, another project developed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has also emerged for the monitoring of pharmaceuticals, in collaboration with IBM, Walmart, KPMG and Merck.

What do you think about using the Blockchain for distribution monitoring in the pharmaceutical industry? Tell us your opinion in the comment section below.