Sal, the manager of Cross Creek gin in Corcoran, California, got a call on his phone. It was Brian from Applied DNA Sciences (APDN). “Hi Sal, I got an alert from your DNA Transfer System. Could you check the thermostat on the refrigeration unit?” This is used for storing the SigNatureT DNA solution which was sprayed on the high-quality Pima cotton fiber during the cotton ginning process.
“The power’s on and it seems to be running” Sal replied. Sitting in his office in Stony Brook, New York, Brian scanned down his computer screen. “I’m seeing that the temperature has been gradually rising above the setpoint. Try turning down the thermostat a bit”. “Sure, no problem,” Sal said as he adjusted the control.
A few hours later, Brian checked his screen again. The adjustment hadn’t helped. He called customer support at the manufacturer, who referred a local service technician to be dispatched out to the gin. Driving home from the office that evening, the service technician called from the gin. “I found the problem. It was just an accumulation of dust on the heat exchanger. The unit’s working properly now.” The next day, Brian logged the incident, wrote up a root cause analysis, and proposed corrective action for preventative maintenance.
If this type of refrigeration failure had occurred without notice, it could have resulted in a serious quality issue. The cotton gins are large, busy facilities, and once the ginning season starts up they run almost 24 by 7 from October through March. Every minute of downtime equates to dollars lost and everyone from the cotton growers and gins, the commodity merchants, spinners, weavers, finishers in the global supply chain, to the final brands and stores, such as Bed Bath & Beyond, depend on APDN’s molecular tagging technology to authenticate and prove their textile products truly come from the highest quality American Pima cotton. There is no room for failure.
There has been a lot of hype surrounding the “Internet of Things”, and it is considered by many to be the next big wave in information technology. However, some application scenarios are more feasible and practical than others. APDN started as biotech security company which was very focused on “wet lab” activities. Our biochemists and genetic engineers worked in the lab to design DNA taggants which, through inks, varnishes, and other water or solvent based carriers could be printed directly on discrete items (eg. military electronic components, pharmaceutical packaging) or embedded in bulk material (cotton fiber, extruded/molded plastics). Our forensic scientists devised methods to extract and authentic these molecular tags. These activities were confined to our labs.
Over time, as APDN began to deploy these marking and authentication technologies with our customers, it became very clear that in order to deliver complete business solutions, our core competencies needed to expand beyond science in the lab. We partnered with local engineering firms to design and build special purpose equipment to reliably perform DNA tagging in industrial environments. We borrowed technology from the medical diagnostic device industry and re-engineered devices originally intended for field hospital bedside diagnostics testing into portable authentication devices for our “molecular barcodes” which could be used by our customers and third-party quality auditors for onsite testing.
As our solutions became more robust and deployed into the field, we next realized that the essence of all our solutions boiled down to capturing, managing, and monitoring information that related to physical materials. The traditional barcode is a good analogy. By itself, the bar code label has little value. However, when combined with the appropriate IT systems to manage the printing, scanning, and tracking of those codes and their related information, entire supply chains can be transformed and optimized. Our DNA barcodes needed the same type of supporting systems in order to maximize business value. APDN had several scientists, but only a handful of IT folks. However, we rolled up our sleeves and again working with some local partners, we started developing IT solutions to make our DNA marking and authentication equipment smarter.
An example is the latest generation of our DNA Transfer Systems deployed in our customers’ cotton gins around the US. Working closely with our engineers, we built PLC (programmable logic controller) based controls and sensors on the equipment. Exceptional conditions immediately trigger email or text message alerts to the appropriate people. We’ve developed .NET web applications which allow our partners and customers access to the information they need to manage their supply chains, ensuring quality and integrity.
We continue our development on these platforms to align with the business needs of our customers and partners. Since the information regarding forensic authentication of physical goods has an important relation to global supply chain and quality assurance organizations, the design of our solution architecture will accommodate either a centralized database or distributed ledger systems, such as blockchain architectures. We have been prototyping with the Hyperledger open source project, which we believe will be one of the predominant blockchain platforms to represent supply chains of physical goods. We’ve set up virtual Docker instances running chaincode written in Go on Ubuntu Linux as blockchain nodes interacting with each other.
We don’t build our own blockchain platform, but we will develop the API (application programming interface) to allow our lab and field marking and authentication systems to connect to a secure blockchain transaction. The implications of this are important. Current blockchain technology provides a secure transactional audit trail but does not confirm the authenticity of the physical goods at the point of the transaction. It is feasible for the physical goods to be switched or diluted during the transaction. Adding a trusted “digital certification” of a physical authentication at critical nodes in the blockchain seems to be an obvious value-add for businesses concern with the physical authenticity of their goods.
So the next story we hope to tell in the coming year or so will be similar to that of the DNA transfer systems at the cotton gins, but more oriented to the authentication side of business operations. Portable DNA authentication devices being utilized across global supply chains and all talking to an integrated information network, whether a single company’s ERP system or an extended blockchain network spanning an industry, is our strategic vision and that’s what we’ll continue to build toward. We are very open to partnerships in these areas, so feel to contact us about mutual opportunities.
