Blockchain healthcare consortium PharmaLedger has declared the first eight use cases for its initiative. Launched in January 2020, the project is due to last three years. It has a budget of over €20 million, mainly from the European Union’s IMI (Innovative Medicines Initiative) and the EPIA (European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations). PharmaLedger is constituted of 29 members, including 12 global pharmaceutical companies like GSK and Novartis.

PharmaLedger is concentrated on developing a blockchain core in the supply chain domain that supports the clinical supply of investigational medicinal products and traceability of finished products. The functionality will involve inventory visibility, material traceability, and digital recalls, as well as anti-counterfeiting measures. Final products that have been by this system will be marked with a barcode, a scan of which can provide the consumer with an eLeaflet that reveals data on recalls, the product, and interactions with other medications. 

In the health data domain, PharmaLedger is launching processes to improve the recruitment of patients for clinical trials. It attempts to fix the recent flawed and costly system by building a platform with profiles for both patients and the trials. The consortium expects that this will help match the two more efficiently and streamline the whole process.

Also involved in this domain is the Personalized Medicine project, designed to provide better and more personalized treatments for patients while maintaining privacy. 

For the clinical trial domain, projects involve an “eConsent use case” that operates to digitize the recent paper-heavy process and a medical device application that achieves IoT data into advanced analytics.

PharmaLedger played up security and privacy as significant themes in a current statement on these projects. For instance, the dynamic permissioning project, which mounts the health data and clinical trial domains, strives to strengthen patient data ownership and provide them total control over which stakeholders can access their health data.

“For Blockchain to achieve its potential in helping our society become digitally trustworthy, mass adoption and true horizontal innovation need to take place,” said Clarisse Dias da Mota of Novartis and PharmaLedger’s PMO in a statement. “PharmaLedger contributes to that by proposing and developing both use case-specific solutions and an overarching open-source platform.”

Core blockchain infrastructure

Following on from our earlier report on PharmaLedger, the blockchain infrastructure will support various chains. Different blockchains and technologies will be “rooted” on a root blockchain. The purpose is to utilize the blockchain protocol, which is deemed to most fit the use case. The project also uses off-chain data storage and self-sovereign applications (as opposed to identity). That way, the data and logic are in the control of the application owner. A prototype is being developed utilizing this design, and more will be revealed in a future whitepaper.