D-ISN/Collaborative Research: Financial and Network Disruptions in Counterfeit and Illegal Medicines Trade

University Of Houston, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

The objective of this Disrupting Operations of Illicit Supply Networks (D-ISN) project is to develop and evaluate a network-enabled system that will identify points of intervention and coordinate stakeholders' efforts to disrupt illicit flows of medical products. It seeks to catalyze technological innovations using a coordinated approach that includes access to critical data, network analysis, distributed inference, identification of strategic points of intervention, and mitigation approaches to disrupt the flow of illegal, substandard, and falsified medicines (ISFM trade). The project will advance our Nation's ability to effectively disrupt trade in illicit and counterfeit pharmaceuticals to prevent offenders from adapting their modus operandi to circumvent controls and consequently undermine public health, revenue, competition, the rule of law, and impact national security. The research team's collaboration with industry and law enforcement agencies will facilitate an interactive process regarding disruption techniques. In addition, the collective effort is designed to launch discussions about new governance and social control models whereby government, private sector, and academic parties are motivated to share skills, knowledge, and data towards solving social problems. The solution to a social problem is built into a business model, which can serve in the handling of other similar challenges (e.g., corruption, terrorism, climate crisis, peacebuilding). The project employs a multidisciplinary set of methods from criminology, computer science, and pharmacology to develop a multiplex network-enabled system that will identify points of intervention and can be used to coordinate efforts of stakeholders to disrupt illicit flows of the medical product, create consensual knowledge on the nature of the problem, and develop and populate a data infrastructure to disrupt illegal medical supply chains effectively so as to minimize the social harm they cause. Specially, this project will address five primary objectives: 1) use original and other research data to identify criminogenic asymmetries and control weaknesses in the ISFM trade; 2) mine distributed data to infer clusters and linkages, and construct a multiplex network from our aggregated data to discover topological & physical properties of ISFM networks and predict missing entities and connections between entities; 3) discover the most impactful failure modes using the cascading failures theory and validate the intervention strategy by extending the microfluidic, optical and quantitative testing platform (similar to PharmaChk) to incorporate robust, accurate, but inexpensive chemical tests for a shortlist of high-priority targets (antibiotics and anti-infectives) including opioids; 4) use internet of things and blockchain to enable highly instrumented producer-to-patient supply chains that enable detection of ICM trade; and 5) develop a framework and incentives for multi-stakeholder collaboration, and build a Social Accountability on ISFM Index to manage responses and enable collective non-profit, private, and public action. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.