India Adopts Blockchain and IoT for Safe Delivery of Life-Saving Vaccines 

In a bid to enhance global delivery of life-saving vaccines and eliminate wastage, Siddarth Chakravarty, a former Cisco employee and entrepreneur is developing a distributed ledger technology (DLT) based solution that enables end-to-end tracking of vaccines, reports Times of India on August 10, 2019. 

StaTwig Tracking Vaccines with DLT

According to research reports by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), at least 20 million children across the world missed out on life-saving vaccines like diphtheria, tetanus, and measles in 2018 due to wastage caused by spoilt vaccines. 

Chakravarty says most vaccines get spoilt in transit due to frequent temperature fluctuations. 

In the past, market participants in the pharmaceuticals and food industries reportedly tackled the issue of spoilage with data loggers that would signal temperature variations in drugs or food products by changing color in tandem with the fluctuation in temperature. 

These devices are however inefficient, as they fail to specify the exact time or location where the change in temperature occurred.

Despite the challenges, UNICEF and WHO claim to have prevented the outbreak of these diseases by an impressive 86 percent, by giving children in various regions three doses of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccines, since 2010.

Even at that, the organizations say that coverage, however, needs to be upped to 95 percent to completely prevent the outbreak of vaccine-preventable diseases.

Chakravarty Changing the Narrative

To put an end to the issue of poor vaccine delivery, Chakravarty is now launched a startup named StaTwig, whose primary focus is to develop a robust blockchain and internet of things (IoT) powered solution.

Specifically, Chakravarty says the solution will provide end-to-end visibility of vaccines from the manufacturing plant down to health care centers.

This way, the vaccine makers will be able to monitor the supply chain in real-time and make improvements where necessary and it also makes it very difficult for bad actors to counterfeit the vaccines.

Chakravarty declared:

“They are not just able to track their consignment and know when it has been delivered, the solution also helps them predict when their next order will be placed,”

In related news, earlier in June 2019, BTCManager informed that IBM, Walmart, KPMG and Merck had collaborated with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted a blockchain pilot for the tracking of pharmaceuticals from manufacturer to end-users.