DrugTrace: Leveraging blockchain and IoT for anti-counterfeit drug traceability

The pharmaceutical supply chain has long grappled with counterfeit drugs, cold-chain integrity failures, and transparency challenges, all of which compromise patient safety and public health. This paper introduces DrugTrace, a practical traceability platform that combines blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to address these gaps. The software integrates an Ethereum-based immutable ledger for end-to-end drug traceability, IoT sensors deployed via Node-RED to enable real-time environmental monitoring (temperature and humidity), and IPFS for off-chain data storage (sensor logs and certificates). A Random Forest classifier validates pharmaceutical marketing authorization (AMM) certificates, achieving 94% accuracy on a synthetic dataset of 1000 certificates. The proposed platform contributes to the development of secure and transparent supply chains in regulated industries beyond pharmaceuticals (AMM is the French acronym for Autorisation de Mise sur le Marché (Marketing Authorization)).