# A Non-Fungible Token Solution for the Track and Trace of Pharmaceutical Supply Chain
## 5 Conclusions  
In these last few years, the industrial makeup has seen a tremendous boost of innovation. Under the hat of Industry 4.0 (14.0) initiatives, technological and digital solutions have been integrated at different levels of a company, transforming enterprises into smart organizations able to improve the effectiveness of their management, the sustainability of their production, and their distribution processes, and to increase communication with all the stakeholders of the supply chain.  
In this paper, a thorough review of I4.0 applications has been carried out, describing advantages and barriers for different industry sectors. Among those, a very interesting I4.0 business use case, the serialization of the pharmaceutical drugs, has been summarized highlighting its main elements. Due the latest good manufacturing practice (GxP) directives, in the previous years, its implementation has become crucial for this industry sector, introducing a stricter regulation framework for the distribution and commercialization of pharmaceutical products worldwide and forcing drug manufacturers to renew their production lines with smart Industry 4.0 equipment. Then, it was pointed out that serialization is at the basis of the track and trace process, along the entire pharmaceutical distribution network up to the final consumer.  
The main issues of the centralized governance architecture were discussed, providing the motivations for a decentralized solution able to compliment the standard track and trace process and overcome its inherent limitations. Due to the I4.0 intercommunication solutions, an innovative solution based on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has been proposed; specifically, the solution discussed in this paper builds upon the generic serialization technology enforced by the pharmaceutical manufacturers and can be easily plugged in without interfering or modifying the standard serialization process. Moreover, it was shown how such an approach can strengthen the track and trace process, improve the communication among the supply chain stakeholders, and increase trust with the final consumers.  
The proposed solution was conceived to run on a test environment of a publicly permissioned blockchain, the VeChain Thor blockchain, and all the basic SW/HW components required to test a prototype application were discussed: the decentralized progressive web app, the blockchain server that synchs on the pharmaceutical manufacturer's serialization manager, and the NFT smart contract.  
Objectives of the next research activities are to complete and implement the NFT track and trace prototype in mainnet, start a collaboration with local enterprises, and test the feasibility of the solution with real stakeholders in order to understand what else can be done to improve this process, track some relevant metrics to analyse bottlenecks, and provide valid remediations.  
Conceptualization, F.C. and C.S.; methodology, A.S. and L.M.O.; software, F.C. and A.S.; validation, D.D., D.G. and C.S.; formal analysis, F.C.; investigation, F.C.; resources, D.G.; data curation, D.D.; writing--original draft preparation, F.C.; writing--review and editing, C.S.; visualization, L.M.O.; supervision, D.G.; project administration, C.S.; funding acquisition, D.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research has been partially supported by project Biotrak Azione 1.1.5-PO FESR 2014-2020 n. prog. 08 SR1091000150-CUP G69J18001000007.  
Data Availability Statement: Data sharing not applicable.