VeriShare

VeriShare -- a user-friendly app that verifies the authenticity of medication, protecting consumers from counterfeit drugs and curbing piracy in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

VeriShare offers a mobile app and an online web platform where the user can upload a picture of the drug that they wish to assess as well as additional information such as the location, the company the drug was purchased from, the name of the seller, and the weight of the drug. The platform's underlying software returns the status of the drug as counterfeit or authentic, along with the confidence level. The app can also run offline in areas without connectivity, allowing anyone to use it regardless of location. Moreover, to make the design as user-friendly as possible, we eliminate the need for user-provided input as much as possible, basing our classifications as much as possible from crowd-sourced information as well as from automated detection such as through pictures being taken and through location and temporal patterns.

Drug counterfeiting is a serious public health issue that has grown over the past decade: between 2011 and 2015 alone, the global incidence of drug counterfeiting increased by 51% [1]. The counterfeiting epidemic impacts all countries regardless of their level of development: in 2019, the release of blood pressure medications tainted with a known carcinogen affected tens of millions of patients in the United States; moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has also led to an additional surge in the severity of the issue. Currently, the WHO attributes over one million deaths annually and $21 billion in global financial impact to the global counterfeit drug market [2]. Today, there are several services that aim to address this issue. However, each of their solutions require the cooperation of major pharmaceutical corporations as well as costly tracking-and-tracing infrastructure and administrative overhead from intermediate laboratory tests [3]. Our solution, VeriShare, aims to bypass those prohibitive costs and support patients and end-consumers directly, reaching a critically under-served market.

[1] Naughton B, Roberts L, Dopson S , et al. Effectiveness of medicines authentication technology to detect
counterfeit, recalled and expired medicines: a two-stage quantitative secondary care study. BMJ Open
2016;6:e013837. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2016-013837.
[2] https://www.american.edu/kogod...
[3] https://www.forbesafrica.com/h...

The solution serves all patients and healthcare professionals who are at risk of exposure to counterfeit drugs, especially communities with reduced access to quality healthcare, targeting populations that are worst exposed to the counterfeit market, including lower-income, underserved communities where residents often need to resort to independent pharmacies, online vendors, and clinics in order to find medicines that they can afford, as well as all patients who take medicines that are targeted by counterfeiters more frequently and are therefore at a higher risk of suffering quality issues. VeriShare addresses their needs by empowering patients with an immediate, well-informed assessment of whether the medicine in their hands is a counterfeit and the confidence level of this evaluation. Anyone can upload a picture of their medication onto Verishare's website or mobile app and receive the result within minutes. Morever, VeriShare facilitates crowdsourcing of counterfeit reports by allowing users to submit reports of counterfeits to the platform, further enhancing the accuracy of each assessment. By informing patients and healthcare professionals, Verishare protects consumers from high-risk medications; and has the potential to play a critical role in cracking down on illicit networks trading counterffeit drugs and safeguarding the legitimate pharmaceutical market.

Our team has actively engaged with members of the community who are most at risk of being exposed to the counterfeit drug market, which include the elderly, racial minorities, low-income residents, and other groups with reduced access to reliable healthcare services. Sharon has also previously conducted research at the Stanford School of Medicine and led study group discussions for neuroscientists at Caltech on research into addiction, drug policy, and the impact of the opioid crisis on marginalized groups such as minorities and the elderly. Moreover, Sharon volunteered to work with older adults assisting them with the use of technology and learned about the best practices of technology design for the elderly population. Likewise, Isabel has volunteered at Mount Sinai Hospital to assist staff in serving and facilitating clinical care for low-income and elderly patients.

To date, we have conducted extensive research on solutions that serve our target population today. Based on our latest research, most products on the drug detection market offer solutions for commercial clients and larger organizations, but do not serve patients and the general public. Moreover, we have built a website where we share a prototype of the VeriShare platform, and are currently developing and finessing the analytical methods that will drive the the platform's predictive capabilities. Once the development phase is complete, we plan to implement a pilot testing this product with residents in the Hunts Point - Mott Haven and Highbridge - Morrisania neighborhoods, which has been among the hardest hit by unintentional drug poisoning cases in NYC over the last five years.

Software and AI are the core technologies that power our solution.

Our solution is currently in its development phase; therefore it has not yet been offered to its target population. We plan to first serve neighborhoods in New York City that are hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, starting with Highbridge - Morrisania and Hunts Point - Mott Haven, where low-income communities suffer the highest rates of unintentional drug poisoning deaths in NYC at over double the city's average [1].

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/epi/databrief104.pdf

Goal 1: Reduce fatality rates from unintentional drug poisoning in pilot locations by at least 10%.

Goal 2: Raise public awareness of pharmaceutical counterfeiting as a global health issue and drive greater support and accountability across key stakeholders involved in facilitating and regulating the pharmaceutical supply chain.

Goal 3: Achieve an annual user retention rate of at least 30% on VeriShare's mobile app.

Goal 1: Reduce fatality rates from unintentional drug poisoning in pilot locations by at least 10%. We use fatality rates from unintentional drug poisoning as a proxy metric due to insufficient data on fatality rates directly attributed to counterfeit drugs alone. We have selected 10% as the threshold for success because the neighborhoods selected for the pilot are 10-15% above the NYC average; therefore, we aim for VeriShare to at minimum bring these locations down to average.

Measurement Plan: Partner with the NYC Department of Health, which has been tracking fatality rates over the past five years, to collect the latest data on this key statistic.

Goal 2: Raise public awareness of pharmaceutical counterfeiting as a global health issue.
Measurement Plan: Track key metrics on conversations around pharmaceutical counterfeiting on social media platforms, including number of shares or retweets of posts regarding this public health issue.

Goal 3: Achieve an annual user retention rate of at least 30% on the mobile app. This is because the average annual retention rate for healthcare apps is 16% while the average retention rate for apps across all categories is 35%. Therefore, the 30% threshold brings usage sufficiently close to the global average while also performing significantly better than the category average.

Measurement Plan: Gather data from Google Analytics around user retention over the course of the year and run a cohort analysis to find the proportion of users that continue to engage with the app by the end of the period.

As we plan to finish prototyping and pilot VeriShare's mobile app by the end of the year, the two main barriers to accomplishing this solution's objectives are primarily technical and market-related. The technical barrier involves finessing and deploying the predictive analytics and computer vision techniques underlying the product's primary functionalities while incorporating key domain expertise around commonly counterfeited medications and the pharmaceutical supply chain. Therefore, the main challenge with this barrier does not lie with the engineering of this product; our team is confident that we can build VeriShare's core product due to our prior experience working on projects involving app development, data analytics, and machine learning. Instead, it is around obtaining a full-time team member with domain expertise in the pharmaceutical industry or experience tackling criminal counterfeiting activity in the drug market. The market-related barrier involves ensuring that communities in need are able to adopt and effectively leverage VeriShare. We plan to overcome this barrier by partnering with local clinics, independent pharmacies, and hospitals to market VeriShare to our target consumers -- patients who are most at risk of exposure to the counterfeit drug market.

Sharon has experience performing research at the Stanford School of Medicine, which led her to become a finalist in the Siemens Competition in high school. In college, she began doing computational neurobiological research at the Rockefeller University in NYC. After graduation, she began pursuing her PhD in Social and Decision Neuroscience at Caltech, working on research that led her to win the Caltech Graduate Research Spotlight Competition in 2020. She later decided to transfer and graduate from the Electrical Engineering department, focusing on learning how to work with big data, networks, computer vision, and machine learning. After graduating this past year, she began working as a machine learning teacher, teaching students how how to use computer vision to detect breast cancer and pneumonia. This experience taught her about how to train new machine learning engineers who decide to join the VeriShare team. Now, as a software engineer experienced with working with big data and machine learning in the field of biology, Sharon has the technical and managerial skills that can help launch VeriShare into the forefront of the medical field.

Isabel is an operations research engineer and product analyst who is dedicated to improving the quality of life of underserved groups. Having previously served as a part-time research assistant at the CUNY Institute of Macromolecular studies, Isabel is familiar with the chemical compositional analysis techniques that are often used to test for counterfeit drugs in the lab. Moreover, she has conducted market research on current solutions aimed towards mitigating the proliferation of fraudulent pharmaceuticals on the market. Equipped with these skills and experiences, Isabel has the commitment and vision to help drive VeriShare's development.

Once VeriShare's pilot begins, we plan to partner with major drug manufacturers, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, online marketplaces, e-commerce companies, community groups, the public health departments in municipalities hard-hit by the counterfeit market, and the US Pharmacopeial Convention (USP).

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