Cryptopharmaceuticals: Increasing the Safety of Medication by a Blockchain of Pharmaceutical Products

The future health-care system will contain an ever expanding number of digital elements. The data stored both at a centralized health-care level and at a local, patient level (e.g., on a smartphone) will be core elements when deciding treatment strategies in a health-care scenario with Internet of t...

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Veröffentlicht in:Journal of pharmaceutical sciences 2019-09, Vol.108 (9), p.2838-2841
Hauptverfasser: Nørfeldt, Lasse, Bøtker, Johan, Edinger, Magnus, Genina, Natalja, Rantanen, Jukka
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:The future health-care system will contain an ever expanding number of digital elements. The data stored both at a centralized health-care level and at a local, patient level (e.g., on a smartphone) will be core elements when deciding treatment strategies in a health-care scenario with Internet of things–based elements. The current way of manufacturing pharmaceutical products and related existing logistic solutions is not ready for such a revolution. One of the key challenges is cybersecurity and related robust public key infrastructure solution. This work introduces one element of a potential solution at a prototype level: the concept of cryptopharmaceuticals where pharmaceutical products are connected in a patient-specific blockchain of individual dosage units. This technology is based on the concept where each produced dosage unit has a unique information-rich pattern. A proof-of-concept smartphone application was applied to demonstrate the visualization of this blockchain at different levels. This includes the manufacturing of the individualized dosage unit, the patient view for his/her personal blockchain, and integration of these products into a health Internet of things system. This unbreakable blockchain of personal medication history will provide means to avoid counterfeit products and to enable innovative logistic solutions.
ISSN:0022-3549
1520-6017
DOI:10.1016/j.xphs.2019.04.025