Beyond the digital record, blockchain is being applied to the physical side of medicine: how drugs are made, shipped, authenticated and kept safe. A patent landscape study of 491 patent families shows a steady stream of filings here, many peaking in 2015–18.

Manufacturing and quality

Patents in this area cover ingredient identification, process tracing, quality checking, packaging and medical device manufacturing. Examples from the study:

• The Digital Currency Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China has a reference on a blockchain-based pharmaceutical production process.
• Nant Holdings published a 2015 patent on whole-process monitoring of drug quality and safety.
• Cable Labs filed in 2018 for storing, tracking, verifying and publishing quality-inspection data for agricultural, pharmaceutical and manufactured goods on a distributed ledger.
• Black Gold Coin (US) has a 2018 patent on inspecting pharmaceutical products using blockchain and a distributed ledger.
• Nokia has a reference on security and traceability of drugs.
• KONA I (Korea) filed in 2018 on product packaging using blockchain and digital currency, and Beston Technology’s 2019 patent uses unique identifiers on packaging to provide product provenance and anti-counterfeiting.

Supply chain

Supply chain patents cluster around product authentication, inventory management, tracking and delivery. Most are alive, and those on medical inventory management mainly originate in the US and were published between 2015 and 2018.

Mastercard filed patents in 2018 on product authentication using blockchain and hash tables. Cognitive Scale has a patent on tracking biological samples on a private or public distributed ledger, and on tracking drugs through unique product identifiers. BanQu, a US blockchain-as-a-service company, covers processing orders for medication and their delivery. Duke University has a patent on monitoring a delivery box using an identifier through blockchain, and New York University has one on managing inventory by tracking the payment process with artificial intelligence.

The industry has also produced MediLedger, described in the study as an open, decentralized network for the pharmaceutical supply chain, aimed at track-and-trace compliance, patient safety, drug supply security and simpler payments.

Safety

Safety patents span clinical trials, device safety and precaution or prevention. Health2047 has patents on verifying clinical data and storing it with clinical trial records using cryptocurrency and a network ledger. Dacadoo has a patent on reconditioning an intravascular device for reuse using hash tables. Allied Bioscience has the most patents on device and apparatus safety. Other examples include a Chinese company’s patent on testing drinking water with an intelligent device and LifeSemantics’ use of keys to encrypt and decrypt biometric data.

Applications: monitoring and efficiency

Monitoring is the application claimed by the largest number of patents, with China and the US filing the most, and universities leading, using hash tables and blockchain. Other applications include medical IoT, where inventor Jeff Stollman has a framework protected in the EP, CN and US, infection control, where Allied Bioscience targets hospital-acquired infections, and clinical scheduling, where Kairoi Healthcare Strategies filed in 2018 on data cleansing to optimize schedules. Sony also has a patent for a medical device monitoring physiological state using a hash table, protected in the US only.

Outlook

Blockchain remains the most common technology across the dataset, followed by distributed network ledgers, with some use of Bitcoin, machine learning and hash tables. For pharma, the clearest value is in combating counterfeits and proving provenance from ingredient to patient. With patents spread across so many niches, the field is far from consolidated.