What is the Impact of Blockchain in Life Sciences?

Blockchain has the power to better the cross-industry partnerships and so on in the life science industry.

Fremont, CA: Blockchain came into public discourse as the distributed ledger technology, which works as the digital currency Bitcoin foundation. Radically, a blockchain is a growing real-time list of electronic records, with each block unit possessing a timestamp, data about the previous block in the chain, and data. The blockchain architecture is moreover resistant to the modification of data or its provenance. Fintech instantly recognized blockchain’s potential, with many use cases now implemented in financial transactions and service life cycles. As far as the life sciences industry is concerned, blockchain has the potential to boost cross-industry partnerships, integrity, and trust created on consensus, interoperability, tracing, and tracking of tangible and intangible entities in numerous service and product pipelines.

Here are three life sciences fields that have the most potential for blockchain adoption and impact.

Drug development and supply chain management 

Adoption of blockchain can be very effective for ensuring integrity in drug manufacturing and supply chain management. Provenance and the tracking of compounds are two vital areas under the purview of authorities like the FDA, with oversight through the Drug Supply Chain Security Act. Blockchain can offer immutable batch records of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in the process of manufacturing and easy reporting systems for contrary events and drug batch recall.  

Clinical trials management

The blockchain technology is affecting the complex processes integrated into the design, implementation, and management of clinical trials. Clinical trials have various stakeholders, including patients, study sponsors, drug or medical device providers, clinical investigators, healthcare professionals such as physicians and nurses, and other government regulatory bodies. 

Sensitive data, including the patients’ health records and a clinical trial’s outcomes, must be private and secure. The trial protocol itself should be immutable and transparent. However, the full process must be carried out transparently for all stakeholders with protocols strictly adhered to. Moreover, secure communication between stakeholders from numerous professions and various clinical trial sites can be inefficient and can easily compromise the protected health information.

Patient-centric usage

Blockchain technology can potentially impact the activities that surround a patient that can be termed patient-centric blockchain usage. These use cases are different and includes implementation of “smart contracts” for patient consent and ownership management of health data, patient record management throughout siloed healthcare data landscapes, prescription medicine management, patient claims and billings management, data security for medical and wearable technology, and also the deployment in personalized medicine. 

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