Leading Blockchain Groups Partner for New Field of Life Economics
Nebula Genomics and Longenisis are taking a hard look at genomic data and health data with the help of blockchain.
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Nebula Genomics and Longenisis, two leading firms in artificial intelligence and blockchain technology for healthcare, announced a collaboration to launch a new research field of life data economics.
The companies were recently featured in a Nature Medicine article titled "Experimenting with blockchain: Can one technology boost both data integrity and patients' pocketbooks?" on the demonstration of their prototype.
"By allowing individuals and large data providers such as biobanks to maintain ownership of their genomic data on our platform and profit from it, Nebula Genomics seeks to incentivize generation of genomic data. In doing so, we will gather the data on a single network where it can be conveniently and securely accessed by researchers. In other words, we will make a marketplace that will create an equitable and efficient economy for genomic data. Longenesis has built a similar platform that instead focuses on longitudinal health data, so our platforms complement one another very well" said Professor George Church, co-founder of Nebula Genomics and professor at both Harvard and MIT.
The collaboration will be geared towards determining the true value of life data. In doing so, the groups will establish two new fields. The first is microdataeconomics, the study of the value of life data used for drug discovery like the structure and activity of specific molecules, both in vitro and in vivo. The second is macrodataeconomics, the study of the value of life data used to determine human health like electronic health records and genomics.
This new resource will help researchers by bringing huge amounts of data of many different types onto a single blockchain platform.