PharmaLedger is a 3 year Public Private Partnership (PPP) Project, that started in January 2020, and which ended in December 2022. The PharmaLedger project was funded through the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) 2 Joint Undertaking (listed under grant agreement No.85399) which receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).
PharmaLedger gathered a consortium of 30 public and private entities, including global pharmaceutical companies, technical partners, universities, research organizations, hospitals, and patients` organisations. These partners collaborated under one common goal, to create an agile and secure blockchain-enabled platform that supports, on the top of it, a set of decentralized and trustless healthcare solutions by nature. These applications were designed to: a) share data in a way that, data and processes are compliant not only with current standards of the healthcare sector, but also with the current legal and ethical framework (data and processes are privacy-enabled by design), and b) allow security, trust and provenance of data and information, by linking data and processes together through the PharmaLedger platform services, which provides the capabilities and infrastructure that allows secure, permissioned, auditable, and patient-mediated exchange of data environment, for exchanging data in the healthcare ecosystem and serving as a single source of truth for the pharma ecosystem.
PharmaLedger provides a 4 layer architecture (see fig. 1). The three layers at the bottom ensure the data self-sovereignty through the OpenDSU approach, while the top and fourth layer enables and integrates the solutions and applications being developed for the use cases.
Figure 1: PharmaLedger Architecture
OpenDSUs stands for Open Data Sharing Units that is a technology that works as a container for Data and the code being built in the blockchain. The DSU is one of the main innovations in the PharmaLedger project. It is cryptographically secured, anchored in the Blockchain, and in control of the user, defining a standard manner of how to store data and code outside the Blockchain (off-chain). The OpenDSUs are supported by digital wallets, which allow users to interact with the blockchain.
From the start of the PharmaLedger project, our goal has been to be technology agnostic, remaining as neutral as possible to the blockchain(s) technology selected by each use case solution. Meaning with this that the architecture and OpenDSUs technology can support any kind of programmable Blockchain technology and any kind of Self Sovereign Identities or any other certificate standards on the top of its architecture. With this approach, we combine the benefits of Blockchain such as integrity, traceability, and non-repudiation while preserving confidentiality and data privacy for the data owners. We, at PharmaLedger want to remain technology neutral; so in the future we can also integrate with any other new coming blockchain technologies.
