Hyderabad: Startup to help curb black marketing of Covid vaccine

HYDERABAD: The clock is ticking on vaccine development and in the meantime, UNICEF is gearing up to lead the procurement and supply of Covid-19 vaccines across the world. One of the major challenges it faces will be nixing attempts of hoarding and black marketing while at the same time ensuring effective supply of these lifesaving doses.
And it is in this mission critical operation that a Hyderabad-based startup, StaTwig, is expected to play a key role.StaTwig has developed a Blockchain-based solution, Vaccine Ledger, under the guidance of the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2019 and its solution has already been tested in multiple pilots across several countries during May-December last year.

Vaccine Ledger is a Blockchain-based platform that captures serial numbers, expiry dates, other manufacturing data using 2D Bar codes and uses them to scan each vaccine at various touch points to track and trace its journey from the manufacturer to the end-consumer.
“We were able to reduce wastage of vaccine from 30% to 10% in multiple UNICEF supported pilots. Now, we have entered into a long-term agreement with UNICEF, wherein StaTwig is granted a preferred vendor status that allows any UNICEF country office to directly procure our solution,” said Sid Chakravarthy, founder and CEO, StaTwig.
Now, the startup is in talks with GAVI and UNICEF to scale up its solution to help in effective supply of Covid-19 vaccines.
“We have already started collecting information at the country level with the help of UNICEF and GAVI so that the data can be mapped for us to customise the solutions,” he added.
Explaining the way Vaccine Ledger works, he said that every dose or vial has a unique identification number that acts like a digital ID. As the product changes hands, every detail with regard to temperature, location and chain of custody is captured by sensors on a real-time basis at the back-end.
As a result, any anomaly, be it change in temperature or change of transport route of the vaccines is captured, alerting the authorities on real-time basis so that they can take prompt action.
“It is like an Aadhar number of the vial… if you type the number, you will be able to see its entire history,” Chakravarthy said.