Abstract
The development of new drugs by pharmaceutical companies becomes a
challenging task as it takes longer timelines, and the clinical trial process involved
before the introduction of any new drug is risky and highly unpredictable. The patient
data available for the clinical trial process is distributed across several databases, and
the data are stored in different formats; hence it becomes difficult to perform clinical
trials. Many stakeholders (pharmaceutical companies, research labs, patients,
participants, government authorities, and many more) across geography are involved in
the clinical trial process. Cooperation among these stakeholders is necessary to conduct
a clinical trial. A Clinical trial is a complex and time-consuming procedure that faces a
constant challenge of data management, data sharing, and data security, resulting in
being an expensive affair.
Blockchain technology can be used to augment the entire workflow of clinical trials
and overcome the mentioned challenges. It uses consensus protocol for efficient
transmission and communication of data between nodes. Patient recruitment for clinical
trials can be easily managed through “Smart contracts”. Any computational problem
related to patient recruitment for a clinical trial, checking the validity of clinical trials,
can be coded with smart contracts. This paper describes the utilization of blockchain to
collect and store patient data and analysis results in a distributed yet secured manner,
which can be shared in a transparent way and remain immutable as well as allows to
tackle the challenges involved in the clinical trial process.