Some of the industry’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly and Co., and Pfizer Inc., have produced a blockchain-based system to trace prescription drugs across the supply chain to prevent the flow of fake medicines better, company officials stated on Friday.

Some two dozen organizations in the industry, including drugmakers, retailers, distributors, and delivery firms, built the blockchain-based MediLedger Network, which it has been testing in the authentication of drug returns. They stated they aim to expand the system further this year.

Blockchain, which first arose as the technology holding virtual currency bitcoin, is a shared database sustained by a network of computers.

The MediLedger group presented a report to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, setting out the advantages of blockchain for this specific problem, Susanne Somerville, chief executive officer at technology company Chronicled, reported Reuters.

Chronicled is MediLedger’s custodian, giving control of the network.

“We think a blockchain solution can prevent counterfeit medicines,” Somerville stated in an interview. “The intent is to improve the security of prescription drugs in this country.”

Amongst the 24 participating businesses are Amgen Inc., FedEx Corp., Novartis, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, AmerisourceBergen Corp., Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., and Walmart Inc.

Medicines known as counterfeit may be infected, contain the incorrect ingredient, or have no active ingredient at all.

The World Health Organization predicts that counterfeit medicines worth 73 billion euros ($79.26 billion) are traded annually.

“The current point-to-point systems infrastructure cannot 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, stated in a statement.

The core purpose of the MediLedger Network is to verify the authenticity of drug identifiers during the supply chain, the MediLedger report stated. This can all be done without any exclusive data being shared openly on the blockchain or ever dropping a company’s control.

The MediLedger project was developed in acknowledgment to the FDA’s call early last year for pilot projects experimenting with an electronic inter-operable system as drafted in the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). ($1 = 0.9210 euros)