A novel Hyperledger blockchain-enabled decentralized application for drug discovery chain management

Abstract

The aim of the drug discovery process is to create a brand-new drug that is both safe and useful for treating disease in patients. The trustworthy collaboration of the organisations involved in the drug discovery process and the integrity of their contributions are essential for this process. Current drug discovery chains use centralised systems, which are susceptible to lockdown by cyberattacks. Blockchain, with its many characteristics such as accountability, immutability, integrity, privacy, and security, has the potential to be extremely useful in drug discovery chain management. The purpose of this work is to create a drug discovery framework utilizing the strengths of blockchain technology in combination with machine learning (ML). Such a system would provide a secure, efficient, and faster drug development life cycle. This study presents a novel Hyperledger fabric-based drug discovery application that empowers the permissioned organisations to upload, update, view, and verify contributions. ML is used to preprocess data and visualise features. In the proposed work, a unique identifier is assigned to each contribution asset using the secure hash algorithm (SHA-256). The proposed design also enables the regulatory authority to issue certificates proving the ownership of contributions to the contributing organisations. The blockchain ledger has been used to store the meta-data and InChIKey of drug contributions, and actual contributions are in off-chain storage. In this work, we have successfully built an end-to-end decentralised drug discovery application with a front-end interface and demonstrated chaincode algorithms. The end-to-end application is not available in any previous work. The Caliper tool has been used to investigate throughput, latency, and resource statistics. The performance and comparative analysis show that the proposed design is scalable and promising for drug discovery chain management.