With the constantly changing climate of supply chain demands and technology within the pharmaceutical industry, companies are on the hunt for the next new trend that will expedite the serialization process. 
 
According to Accenture Life Sciences, verifying where a medicine’s ingredients were made, where the drug was manufactured, and how it was handled all the way to the patient in a trusted manner, is becoming an increasingly mandatory supply chain management capability. 
 
Blockchain technology is a new tool that is able to connect those dots. It allows a network of branches throughout the process to maintain a shared log of information without the risk of tampering. It also eliminates the need for complete trust between the different pathways. This is possible by using a timestamp tracked system to the ensure accuracy of recorded events in the drug’s life. This type of seamless information sharing aims to make communication about the medicine’s history much easier to access from inception to delivery. 
 
Contract Pharma spoke with Carly L. Guenther, managing director at Accenture Life Sciences, about the basics of blockchain technology, and how it will impact the future of pharmaceutical supply chain management.

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Contract Pharma: Can you give a brief overview on what blockchain technology is?
 
Carly L. Guenther: Blockchain is protected by cryptography, which allows a network of nodes to collectively maintain a shared ledger of information without the need for complete trust between the nodes. Blockchain is essentially a time-sequenced chain of events based on an agreed upon consensus mechanism. The mechanism guarantees that, as long as much of the network validates the entries (i.e., the “blocks”) posted to the ledger (i.e., the “chain) as per stated governance rules, information stored on the blockchain can be trusted as reliable. Investors and enterprises across multiple industries and functions have taken notice of blockchain’s potential. Recently, investment and spending on blockchain-based technology have each topped more than $1 billion, and both continue to accelerate. Accenture’s current projections for the blockchain services market alone estimates a CAGR of more than 60 percent, hitting close to $7 billion by 2021. Within life sciences, blockchain technology could provide a $3 billion opportunity by 2025.
 
CP: Can you elaborate on the opportunity you feel that blockchain could provide in the life sciences industry as a whole?
 
CG: Blockchain has applicability across all supply chain functions. However, it can particularly address certain unique aspects of the life sciences industry, such as:

• Provenance: Blockchain technology is an ideal solution, given that no single organization is responsible for provenance. Organizations across the life sciences ecosystem benefit from having authentic product in the supply chain, ensuring brand integrity and improving patient outcomes. Blockchain enables the idea of a “digital passport” for a product, containing all relevant information for each component or ingredient, including instructions and patient adherence information from the packaging;
• Serialization Track and Trace: Like provenance, one of the major challenges with track and trace is the effective exchange of data across the ecosystem of partners from the pharmaceutical manufacturers, to wholesale distributors, to dispensers. With the use of blockchain, supply chain partners can more effectively and securely share data across the supply chain and, eventually, with the end patient; and
• Specialty Logistics: In one aspect of the life sciences supply chain, pressure is mounting on pharmas to optimize their cold chain logistics. When applied to the cold chain, blockchain combined with technologies like Industrial Internet of Things can create secure documentation of storage temperatures at every point in a product’s journey. This enables supply chain managers and executives to identify potential temperature excursions and other efficiencies across the end-to-end supply chain.

CP:  What is the biggest challenge of serialization that blockchain can alleviate? 
 
CG:  While significant investment has gone into serialization capabilities over the past decade, life sciences companies are restricted by traditional technology limitations where information is captured in a database, transmitted to another database (owned by a separate internal or external partner) and then reconciled. Blockchain is becoming increasingly relevant to address the perennial challenges of trust and speed in the life sciences supply chain. Enabling data-driven business decisions in forecasting the flow of goods and having visibility into the origin of materials and inputs has always been difficult, partly due to the technologies involved and partly because suppliers are mistrustful about sharing data they fear will be abused by downstream customers. This can negatively impact their ability to price products effectively.
 
CP:  What are the different ways that blockchain technology can be leveraged, and what are benefits to each?

CG: What if innovations in the life sciences supply chain kept up with those in medicines and treatments?  In one example, patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia are now benefiting from a type of immunotherapy called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. The approach, pioneered by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, involves the extracting immune cells from a patient, modifying them with cancer targeting proteins and giving them back to the patient. These cells are “living drugs” in the patient’s body, with autologous therapies tailored to each patient.
 
There are several benefits of blockchain technology for life sciences, including:

• Immutability/indisputability: Single source of truth, replicated across all nodes; data on the ledger is encrypted, pervasive and persistent;
• Automation: Network self-validates all ledger entries; smart contracts automatically enforce business rules; near real-time data and transaction processing;
• Cost reduction: Reduction in operational costs related to exceptions and reconciliation;
• Auditability: Provides a real-time track-and-trace audit trail; improves business, operational and regulatory reporting;
• Decentralization: Assets are tied and controlled by their owners rather than institutional custodians; exchange of information with pre-agreed consensus validation instead of third-party; and
• Security: Encryption provides record-level security of data; no single point of failure—network is resilient against attacks on individual nodes.

 
CP:  For companies adapting the technology, what would that process be like?
 
CG:  There are several types of blockchains that can drive value for the life sciences supply chain, depending on the need and types of permissions among those sharing information. Different types of blockchains include:

• Public, permissionless blockchains allow access to any user at any time. Ledger management is facilitated by the distributed network (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum);
• Federated, persmissioned blockchains (single or multi-industry) allow access to users based on the rules defined by the group of entities (consortium) participating in the network. Ledger management is facilitated by the consortium (e.g., Ripple, R3, Corda); and
• Private, permissioned blockchains allow access to users based on the permissions set by the private network. Ledger management is facilitated by single company for private use (e.g., Chain, Bankchain).

 CP:  Any predictions for the future of blockchain in the sciences industry?
 
CG: Innovative therapy challenges such as the chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy I mentioned earlier and other macro life sciences influences are driving a shift in products coming to market, specifically within oncology, central nervous system and systemic anti-infectives. These types of therapies challenge the traditional life sciences supply chain, increasing the need for secure and authenticated drugs that are delivered without delay and kept at a verifiable temperature. The right treatment needs to be delivered to the right patient at the right time, all through a secure supply chain.

Investors and enterprises across multiple industries and functions have taken notice of blockchain’s potential.  Within the next three years, Accenture predicts 30 percent of life sciences companies plan to utilize blockchain (if they aren’t already), opening new business opportunities and addressing challenges. Supply chain applications of blockchain are endless for life sciences, given the requirements for specialized medicines and therapies. Organizations that start now—who are willing to experiment, fail fast and innovate based on that experience—will achieve competitive advantage and improve patient outcomes.

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Carly is a Life Sciences Business Consulting Executive with over 14 years of domestic and international consulting experience driving organizations to better operational effectiveness, growth and profitability. Primary focus has been on design and deployment of global supply chains to meet the evolving patient and regulatory (serialization) demands with a close integration with the digital technologies such as blockchain, IoT, and analytics.   She leads the Accenture Products Industry Supply Chain Blockchain practice where she is focused on understanding how current industry & business transformation can be enabled by blockchain.