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Health research is an expensive and risky business, tormented by complexity and business issues. Nanovision hopes to change it using a combination of AI and blockchain technologies. Will they succeed in what appears to be a "dream adventure"?
The National Institute of Health alone provides about $ 32.3 billion in grants annually spread across hundreds of institutions. Thousands of foundations, philanthropists and private companies contribute additional billions.
Billions more dollars are spent on clinical trials, but over 90% of these end up in bankruptcy. The system of every man per se is fragmented and inefficient. Experts say the lack of data sharing slows progress in seeking care for many of society's most pressing medical conditions, such as cancer, tuberculosis, zika, malaria and rapidly evolving Superbugs.
Steve Papermaster, a career entrepreneur who has undertaken many career paths over the course of his thirty-year career as chief executive officer, author, and public policy expert, including a period as senior adviser to President George W. Bush on national and global strategy for innovation, technology and science, believes that the system is severely broken. Said Papermaster:
The way things are now does not work. Every year we spend trillions of dollars on medical treatment, we are donating and spending billions of dollars on research each year, and we are not seeing the results we should be. Critical data is stored in individual institutions and governments around the world, holding back both research findings and patient outcomes when it should be widely shared and improved for collective progress.
Why is health research so broken?
There are many reasons why health research is not widely shared.
Much of the research is driven by companies looking for new "products", so they set priorities based on the highest potential financial return. For example, dementia is expected to affect 82 million people worldwide and cost over $ 800 billion annually, or 1% of global GDP.
Still, big companies like Pfizer are abandoning Alzheimer's research by giving priority to lower risks and lucrative drugs like Viagra. One unique IT infrastructure for sharing does not exist because of the huge variance in IT systems. There is also the problem of privacy and government regulation of sensitive data.
Papermaster, CEO and president of startup Nano Vision, believes his company has found the solution to most of these problems: a blockchain-based, decentralized, peer-to-use network that collects human and molecular data and resources it makes this data accessible to healthcare researchers and even to "scientist citizens" around the world.
The main elements of the Nano Vision care chain are:
Chain of Care
The Nano Vision blockchain platform aims to provide scientists around the world with a common database and to facilitate an effective and collaborative approach that is essential for real-time studies on evolving diseases. Its goal is to remove restrictions and borders and to help researchers work together to find solutions to combat the most pressing health problems in the world, while continuing to receive credit for their contributions. The shared data will be tagged with the contributor's information, which means that they will receive credit and compensation each time the search is used or used to create a healthcare solution.
The platform collects real-time data from institutions around the world and shares them in a blockchain, making it universally accessible and traceable. Distributed registry technology developed by Nano is used to protect and attribute all data on the Nano platform to its correct original source. Said Papermaster:
It was important to use the blockchain within the care development process because it allows the entire global community to share valuable and expensive data. The basic tenants of the blockchain, in which there are immutable data, that rely on decentralized registers, which capture immutable data around where the content was captured, who captured it, who touched it, which chain of activity was # 39; beginning to continue this is a fundamental change in the model of data sharing.
It is a tool that connects everyone. Not just a small subset of people, everyone. For this reason, the decentralized research enabled by the blockchain allows the acceleration of the development of health care.
Nano Sense Chip
Nano Global, a subdivision of Nano Vision, has collaborated with Arm, the world's leading semiconductor company IP, to design and produce Nano Sense chips, small chips that can be inserted into a pin head in a wide range of medical and research environments, where they collect and store data at the molecular level in the blockchain. This blockchain data is immediately accessible.
Inference Engine
The Nano Sense platform includes an AI program that automatically sorts and analyzes data to search for free trends and data sets. Because it uses an machine learning protocol, it becomes more sophisticated the more the data is analyzed. This means that artificial intelligence will be able to identify trends in critical data and draw conclusions, helping to generate discoveries. AI will ultimately be able to predict new trends and areas of collaboration for future health research, drawing connections that normal human researchers may never find in such an immense amount of data.
Nano Cure Coin
To foster data sharing, Nano Sense chips will contain Nano cryptocurrencies as they collect, store and analyze data. Currencies can be bought and sold like other cryptos, and owners can even use them to allocate funds for research activities that are particularly important to them.
Papermaster summarizes the goal of Nano Vision in this way:
The change of play for us in this platform allows thousands, hundreds of thousands of other health professionals, scientists, researchers, biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies to use the services, which are the data themselves powered by the chip up and the collection capacity at the level of simplified services, so that those clever and talented teams can effectively develop their versions of care to tens of thousands of disease states and diseases and even general well-being skills that do not exist today.
My take
It is easy to be skeptical about a company that seems to touch all the buzzword of the current hot company software: blockchain, AI, machine learning, nanotechnology, sensors IoT Ma Nano Vision has a clear and important social and the support of Mark Cuban and Softbank Vision Fund so we hope they succeed.
It seems to me that its greatest challenges will not be on the technological side but on the culture of health research of secrecy and proprietary thinking. The company will have to build a solid network of important institutions that are willing to share their data from the beginning. I'm not convinced that rewarding sharers with cryptocurrency tokens is enough incentive to do so.
The problem of privacy may also be thorny but probably not impossible to overcome
It seems to me that Nano Vision has the same dilemma as Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams". If you build it, will they arrive?
Image of credit – through Startup Nation
