What is blockchain?

A question that still leaves many of us puzzled. Since the recent Bitcoin price drop, blockchain technology is mostly associated with panic attacks amongst cryptocurrency investors.

Well, for me as a non-expert it was an eye opener to learn about how blockchain technology can be beneficial to the pharma industry. A very insightful article, “BlockChain in Clinical Trials – the Ultimate Data Notary” published in Applied Clinical Trials (ACT) this week, explains the principles and technology behind blockchain and its potential application in clinical trials.

For pharma, it is vital to make clinical trials more reproducible, ensuring data for each step is not falsified. Blockchain is used as a notary service and has the potential to reduce systemic risk, increase data quality, and decrease risk of fraud by a notarized process.

Furthermore, the authors state that: “Blockchain technology is the biggest achievement in cryptography of the past decade. Source Data Verification (SDV), which consumes about 20–30% of the clinical trial budget nowadays, will become redundant when blockchain technology disrupts the pharma industry.”