Combating Counterfeit Drugs in Pharmaceutical Supply Chain (PSC) Using Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain

Counterfeit drugs are fake-labeled medicines or substandard medicines. Drugs without active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) or those with wrong proposition of APIs are also called counterfeit drugs. These drugs are very harmful to human life. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report of 2017, 10% of pharmaceutical medicines in India are fake or substandard. Counterfeit drugs find their way into pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) easily due to security issues and traceability issues in the current system. The software solutions presently in use hold the drug detail in databases on cloud central server and are accessed by active actors such as manufacturers, distributors, and retailers in the supply chain via the Internet. A malicious participant in the supplychain can tamper with the database and introduce the counterfeit drugs at any point. To eliminate this security flaw, a secure system with distributed decentralized digital ledger (DDDL) technology can be implemented. The information in such a system is stored on a digital ledger and shared with all the authorized nodes in the peer-to-peer (p2p) network without worrying about central authority to govern. DDDL is a new form of immutable shared database that can be implemented using blockchain. In DDDL, only authorized actors in the network can perform read/write operations. Such a blockchain-based solution leads to improved security and better trust and transparency. Here, we have developed a secured system which is built upon the most popular blockchain platform called Hyperledger fabric blockchain (HFB) to identify and eliminate the counterfeit drugs from PSC and thereby avoid risk to the end consumers who need the drugs. A chaincode is a core element of Hyperledger fabric that defines a set of rules and policies for business logic to execute. We have included Hyperledger Explorer as benchmark tool for analyzing the performance and efficiency of the system that we designed.