Road to Success

ServBlock, a Blockchain and pharmaceutical compliance company is collaborating with Microsoft’s Early Access Engineering programme to produce a novel business case for the use of NFT technology in meeting compliance standards.

Servblock translates the current human to human based quality assurance process to a digital first trust system underpinned by machine to machine interactions and blockchain technology, providing verified data that is automatically checked for compliance.

Pharmaceutical compliance entails a multitude of processes requiring manual checking of data and tasks which require detailed attention, passing numerous levels of scrutiny often multiple times. ServBlock automates this process in a much more secure, timely and cost-efficient manner than the current status-quo with the use of blockchain technology.

The use of blockchain helps create validated digital traceability systems for pharmaceutical parts by recording data in real-time throughout a supply chain. With blockchain solutions, pharmaceutical-based transactions and processes can become secure, cheaper, and quicker than usual. For new biotech facility start up projects ServBlock can save 14,400 commissioning hours resulting in an average saving of 1.5 million euros per project.

As well as cost reduction ServBlock’s technology:

• Eliminates fraud in the pharmaceutical supply chain

• Eliminates the risk of counterfeit or contaminated drugs entering the market

• Greatly reduces human error in the supply chain.

Blockchain is most commonly known for its uses in the financial industry and being particularly rooted in cryptocurrency over the last decade, but its fundamental data integrity properties means it is particularly suited to regulated industries, such as pharmaceutical production and distribution.

In collaboration with Microsoft, ServBlock has developed a novel use of non-fungible token (NFT) technology. NFTs are unique cryptographic tokens that exist on a blockchain and cannot be replicated, normally bought and sold. This model presents the perfect framework to ensure transparency for all stakeholders from beginning to end.

John Ward, CEO and founder of ServBlock, said: ‘Implementing new technologies to aid in the continued improvement of compliance standards is a core pillar of what ServBlock does. To have Microsoft on board gives further validation to the work we have been doing since founding the company and blockchain as a powerful business tool. NFTs have gained recognition and popularity for their use in selling art and a new internet culture, but we are glad to be starting the adoption of real world use within an enterprise setting.’

Quality assurance data is tokenized and in this way shows an end-to-end business use case for NFT use in the pharmaceutical industry. Every business process is signed by business participants, stored then shared through a ledger which itself shows ownership of assets from their creation. Every business process is shared among business participants ensuring traceability at every stop.

Small, Medium & Corporate Lead for Microsoft Ireland, Peter Lougheed said: “NFTs are one of the most exciting concepts to emerge from blockchain technology, and have grown to be hugely significant. It’s great to see a Microsoft Founders Hub member, like ServBlock, continue to scale and expand. We, at Microsoft, are excited to collaborate with ServBlock in developing their technology to better enable the pharmaceutical industry to meet their, often very complex, compliance standards.”

This collaboration presents the first use case of NFTs within a pharmaceutical manufacturing setting and therefore uncovers great potential for the use of blockchain technology in a variety of areas which rely heavily on secure, transparent ownership of assets.