Traceability and Detection of Counterfeit Medicines in Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Using Blockchain-Based Architectures

New age advancement seen in the ICT has enthralled human enthusiasm and excitement to the next level of getting informed and educated about the things they interact with. We want to capture the history of the things from their point of origin. But it has been that history can be altered and misinterpreted for self means. Blockchain is one such revolutionary architecture that ensures history is preserved by maintaining concoction of consortium or consensus over the network between all nodes for historical data and ensures immutability. Different blockchain architecture gives different types of flexibility and usability. Traceability is must for accountability for ensuring history is preserved. Supply chain for pharmaceutical drugs is one such problem where customers need to know the exact timeline of the medicine they are about to intake. Counterfeit drugs are big issue in the market and it is bigger problem than we realize. Fake drugs are entering into the mainstream supplies in the country as traceability is never assured from any other technology. This chapter solves this problem by jotting down each transaction into an immutable distributed ledger as blockchain architecture which cannot be altered or changed. Whenever there is a change of hand of medicines, two things are being recorded, first represent the current owner, and latter remain the timestamp when this took place. Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric along with Hyperledger Composer are the two building blocks of the Blockchain platform used in this chapter. This chapter shows the comparative difference between the two under the use case of pharmaceutical supply chain and defines what the adoptive approach should be while choosing between the two platforms. This chapter shares some pseudo codes for the two platforms showing how to interact with these platforms. At the end, some challenges faced are discussed along with future scope and direction to research areas with some additional resources listed as references.