Merck Looks At Blockchain For Fighting Counterfeit Drugs

Amercian pharmaceutical company Merck is seeking a patent for a blockchain based system that stores the location coordinates of an object and tracks the product as it moves through the supply chain.

The distributed network can be used to verify the authenticity of the product. The patent which was filed in 2016, but published last week, can be used to prevent counterfeiting of products. Merck, which already uses an internal system to keep out fake drugs, will find the system extremely useful in its in its fight against fake drugs.

In its patent filing, Merck says the technology “enables a reliable, secure storage of the reading results with very high data integrity, such that it is essentially impossible to manipulate or erase or otherwise taper [sic] with or lose such data, e.g. due to unintended or deliberate deletion or due to data corruption.”

The pharmaceuticals giant further explains:

“Furthermore, the stored information can be accessed wherever access to the blockchain is available. This allows for a safe and distributed storage and access to the stored reading results, e.g. for integrity verification purposes such as checking whether a supplier of a product being marked with a composite security marking, as described herein, was in fact the originator of the product, or not.”

The patent is expected to remove the inefficiencies in the system. Merck is a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. The company’s representative leads the healthcare working group of the Alliance.