SBIR Phase I: Blockchain Platform for the Secure Distribution of Medicine

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to empower trading partners and key stakeholders in the pharmaceutical supply chain with the ability to track provenance, authenticate medicines, perform targeted recalls, and implement item-level serialization and aggregation on a cost-effective basis. Currently, the pharmaceutical supply chain is plagued by outdated legacy systems, expensive/inefficient product recalls, and counterfeit drugs. The consumption of counterfeit and substandard medicines claims over a million lives annually, while diverting between $75 – $200 Billion in sales from the legitimate pharmaceutical industry. Today, counterfeiters succeed due to a lack of transparency and security throughout the supply chain. With counterfeiters’ rapid adaption to anti-counterfeiting technology, this research aims to develop a platform that enables enterprises to reclaim their revenues and consumer trust with end-to-end visibility through the utilization of blockchain technology. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to develop a secure, scalable, enterprise-grade blockchain platform designed to advance the traceability of medicine within the pharmaceutical supply chain. The project aims to significantly progress the state of the art in serialization and aggregation, secure/efficient data transmission between trading partners, and anti-counterfeiting technology. To accomplish these ends, this project will consist of the design and implementation of proprietary technology consisting of cutting-edge cryptographic algorithms, blockchain architectures, and smart contract protocols to prove technical feasibility within the SBIR Phase I research timeline. This research also aims to establish commercial viability of the innovation by testing transaction scalability, smart contract security, and data privacy on the blockchain network. This project will test scalability by simulating billions of serialized events on the network and benchmarking the blockchain architectures that significantly exceed the current state of the art in serialization and track & trace software. The project intends to explore the viability of smart contracts for automating the verification of transactions and products moving through the supply chain. Since the security of these smart contracts is critical to authentic product/transaction verification, the smart contracts will be tested against adversarial cybersecurity threats and scenarios with unauthorized user access. This project intends to considerably increase data privacy within blockchain networks in order to allow users of the platform the ability to safeguard trade secrets and proprietary knowledge contained within transaction data. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.