ArticleBlockchain in healthcare today2022
Securing the Chain of Custody and Integrity of Data in a Global North-South Partnership to Monitor the Quality of Essential Medicines.
Article in Blockchain in healthcare today, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Substandard and Falsified Medicines, Regulatory Capacity and Public Health: A Narrative Review With a Focus on Africa.Public health challenges · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Substandard and falsified (SF) pharmaceuticals account for an estimated 10% of the pharmaceutical supply chain in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where a lack of regulatory and laboratory resources limits the ability to conduct effective post-market surveillance and allows SF products to penetrate the supply chain. The Distributed Pharmaceutical Analysis Laboratory (DPAL) was established in 2014 to expand testing of pharmaceutical dosage forms sourced from LMICs; DPAL is an alliance of academic institutions throughout the United States and abroad that provides high-quality, validated chemical analysis of pharmaceutical dosage forms sourced from partners in LMICs. Results from analysis are reported to relevant regulatory agencies and are used to inform purchasing decisions made by in-country stakeholders. As the DPAL program has expanded to testing more than 1,000 pharmaceutical dosage forms annually, challenges have surfaced regarding data management and sample tracking. Here, we describe a pilot project between DPAL and ARTiFACTs that applies the blockchain to organize and manage key data generated during the DPAL workflow, including a sample's progress through the workflow, its physical location, provenance of metadata, and lab reputability. Recording time and date stamps with these data will create a permanent and verifiable chain of custody for samples. This secure, distributed ledger will be linked to an easy-to-use dashboard, allowing stakeholders to view results and experimental details for each sample in real time and verify the integrity of DPAL analysis data. Introducing this blockchain-based system as a pilot will allow us to test the technology with real users analyzing real samples. Feedback from users will be recorded and necessary adjustments will be made to the system before the implementation of blockchain across all DPAL sites. Anticipated benefits of implementing the blockchain technology for managing DPAL data include efficient management for routing work, increasing throughput, creating a chain of custody for samples and their data in alignment with the distributed nature of DPAL, and using the analysis results to detect patterns of quality within and across brands of products and develop enhanced sampling techniques and best practices.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.