A New Chapter in Biobanking: Introducing the AminoChain Protocol
Caspar Barnes
Sep 25, 2025
For too long, the story of biobanking has been one of missed opportunities. Behind every donated sample is a person’s trust and a family’s hope for progress, but too often that hope disappears into silence. Families navigating diseases often feel invisible, watching discoveries happen at a distance. Meanwhile, researchers face walls of bureaucracy and fragmented datasets, while public funding cuts leave promising ideas stranded before they ever reach people.
This has been the story of research for decades, but we knew we could help author a better one. And we began with the launch of the AminoChain Specimen Center: the first dynamic, decentralized biospecimen search and discovery platform designed to move beyond passive directories. While earlier “specimen locators” merely listed collections, the Specimen Center harmonizes live metadata across 20+ prominent domestic and international biobanks, including:
The East Cooperative Human Tissue Network at UPenn" to "CHTN Eastern Division (CHTNED) at Penn, Northwestern, McGill’s C‑BIG Neuro Repository (Canada), The Douglas Brain Bank (Canada), Stibion (Netherlands), the Ukrainian Research Group (Ukraine), Shlok (India), the National Disease Research Interchange, ImYoo, the France Tissue Bank, MyAfroDNA (Nigeria), the Advancing Sight Network and more.
Together, these integrations represent 400,000+ specimens across ~150,000 unique donors linked via privacy‑preserving IDs and granular metadata. Rather than static listings, the Specimen Center enables traceable, filterable, and consent‑aware access — turning specimens into living research assets that can power ongoing studies and unlock value for the global research community.
The Specimen Center laid the research foundation. From that work, The AminoChain Protocol was created to put donors, families, and communities back at the center of biomedical research. Instead of treating donors as one-time data points, AminoChain builds an ongoing bridge between people and the research their contributions enable. That means patients can stay connected, add new information over time, and actually share in the value their data helps create.
So what is the AminoChain Protocol? At its simplest, it’s a new kind of biobank - but instead of being locked in a silo, it’s designed to be community-owned, transparent, and built on trust. Think of it as a digital backbone that connects donors, biobanks, advocacy groups, and researchers into one shared ecosystem. Every sample or dataset is logged, linked, and made traceable, so its journey is never lost and its value is always recognized.
The AminoChain protocol brings together three core pillars: donor engagement, sustainable funding, and smarter licensing.
1. Donor engagement.
Today, most people who donate a sample are cut off from the process. Consent forms are one-time transactions, mistrust runs deep, and patients have little agency over how their data is used. AminoChain changes that. Through privacy-preserving donor portals, donors can stay connected, update their information over time, and even choose how their data is shared. Incentive pools allow for benefit-sharing - rewards that acknowledge contributions without coercion - while representation and transparency rebuild trust. In this way, research becomes truly patient-centric, more inclusive, and better equipped to capture the richness of lived experience.
2. Funding for research.
Biomedical discovery has long depended on centralized funding bodies like the NIH. But with budgets under pressure and thousands of grants cut, science can’t afford to rely on fragile pipelines. The AminoChain Protocol introduces new models for financing research: community-backed Collections, philanthropic sponsorships, and bonds that spread risk and open participation. Crucially, it reframes ownership - making data a shared asset rather than a locked resource. This creates sovereignty for communities, aligns incentives across stakeholders, and brings decentralization to a field that desperately needs resilience.
3. Licensing and customized access.
Finally, the protocol reimagines how data is used. Instead of sitting in silos or locked behind restrictive contracts, datasets can be licensed with clear, customizable agreements. Some projects may choose open access; others may allow exclusive use for a time before being recycled and re-licensed. This creates a living Data Lake — a marketplace where datasets are reused, repurposed, and initial costs are amortized over time. The result is a system where valuable knowledge isn’t wasted, and every contribution continues to generate impact long after the first discovery.
The protocol works through “Collections” — projects that gather data for specific diseases or research goals. Instead of waiting on shrinking government grants or unpredictable funding cycles, these Collections can be supported directly by sponsors, philanthropic donors, or even community bonds. Once the data is generated, access to it is managed through clear licensing rules, and royalties flow automatically back to the people and groups who made it possible. This way, research moves faster, and benefits are fairly shared.
At its heart, AminoChain isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about agency. Patients don’t just give once and walk away; they can re-engage, update their health information, and remain active partners over time. Researchers don’t just see a dataset; they see a living, evolving resource. And communities don’t just contribute; they help shape the science and share in its impact. That’s the promise of the AminoChain Protocol: a biobank designed for the people, by the people, and with the people.
To bring this vision to life, we’re proud to share that AminoChain will be building its protocol on Syndicate’s appchain infrastructure. Syndicate provides the secure, scalable, and flexible foundation we need to power everything from patient engagement to dataset licensing. Their infrastructure allows us to embed compliance, royalties, and benefit-sharing directly into the code — ensuring that trust isn’t just promised, but programmatically enforced. By joining forces with Syndicate, we’re not only building a decentralized biobank; we’re building one that can scale globally and endure.
This partnership is about more than technology. It’s about alignment. Like us, Syndicate believes in empowering communities and unlocking new models of ownership. Together, we’re building an infrastructure that ensures patients and advocacy groups are never sidelined, but instead remain central to the future of science. The AminoChain Protocol, powered by Syndicate, is a statement: the future of biomedical research will be open, participatory, and community-owned.
The launch of the AminoChain Protocol marks the start of this new story. In the months ahead, we’ll begin with the first patient-driven cohorts, in partnership with advocacy groups and research sites around the world. Together, we can prove that biobanking doesn’t have to be extractive — it can be participatory, ethical, and profoundly human. The future of biomedical research is one where communities aren’t just subjects of science, but co-authors of discovery.
©2025 AminoChain
©2025 AminoChain
A New Chapter in Biobanking: Introducing the AminoChain Protocol
Biobanks are the backbone of biomedical research and drug discovery, safeguarding millions of human biospecimens including blood, tissue, DNA, and other biological materials, collected from donors across a variety of healthcare, research, and clinical settings. These invaluable resources fuel breakthroughs in disease research, new treatments, and the advancement of personalized medicine.
Caspar Barnes
Sep 25, 2025
For too long, the story of biobanking has been one of missed opportunities. Behind every donated sample is a person’s trust and a family’s hope for progress, but too often that hope disappears into silence. Families navigating diseases often feel invisible, watching discoveries happen at a distance. Meanwhile, researchers face walls of bureaucracy and fragmented datasets, while public funding cuts leave promising ideas stranded before they ever reach people.
For too long, the story of biobanking has been one of missed opportunities. Behind every donated sample is a person’s trust and a family’s hope for progress, but too often that hope disappears into silence. Families navigating diseases often feel invisible, watching discoveries happen at a distance. Meanwhile, researchers face walls of bureaucracy and fragmented datasets, while public funding cuts leave promising ideas stranded before they ever reach people.
Our Motivation
This has been the story of research for decades, but we knew we could help author a better one. And we began with the launch of the AminoChain Specimen Center: the first dynamic, decentralized biospecimen search and discovery platform designed to move beyond passive directories. While earlier “specimen locators” merely listed collections, the Specimen Center harmonizes live metadata across 20+ prominent domestic and international biobanks, including:
The East Cooperative Human Tissue Network at UPenn" to "CHTN Eastern Division (CHTNED) at Penn, Northwestern, McGill’s C‑BIG Neuro Repository (Canada), The Douglas Brain Bank (Canada), Stibion (Netherlands), the Ukrainian Research Group (Ukraine), Shlok (India), the National Disease Research Interchange, ImYoo, the France Tissue Bank, MyAfroDNA (Nigeria), the Advancing Sight Network and more.
Together, these integrations represent 400,000+ specimens across ~150,000 unique donors linked via privacy‑preserving IDs and granular metadata. Rather than static listings, the Specimen Center enables traceable, filterable, and consent‑aware access — turning specimens into living research assets that can power ongoing studies and unlock value for the global research community.
The Specimen Center laid the research foundation. From that work, The AminoChain Protocol was created to put donors, families, and communities back at the center of biomedical research. Instead of treating donors as one-time data points, AminoChain builds an ongoing bridge between people and the research their contributions enable. That means patients can stay connected, add new information over time, and actually share in the value their data helps create.
So what is the AminoChain Protocol? At its simplest, it’s a new kind of biobank - but instead of being locked in a silo, it’s designed to be community-owned, transparent, and built on trust. Think of it as a digital backbone that connects donors, biobanks, advocacy groups, and researchers into one shared ecosystem. Every sample or dataset is logged, linked, and made traceable, so its journey is never lost and its value is always recognized.
The AminoChain protocol brings together three core pillars: donor engagement, sustainable funding, and smarter licensing.
1. Donor engagement.
Today, most people who donate a sample are cut off from the process. Consent forms are one-time transactions, mistrust runs deep, and patients have little agency over how their data is used. AminoChain changes that. Through privacy-preserving donor portals, donors can stay connected, update their information over time, and even choose how their data is shared. Incentive pools allow for benefit-sharing - rewards that acknowledge contributions without coercion - while representation and transparency rebuild trust. In this way, research becomes truly patient-centric, more inclusive, and better equipped to capture the richness of lived experience.
AminoChain is a technology that connects enterprise medical institutions, providing the basis for developers to build user-owned decentralized healthcare applications.
Medical institutions install a software package called the “Amino Node”, which integrates into the institution's endogenous tech stacks (e.g. their EMR’s, Inventory Management Softwares, Data Capture Softwares etc). While data stays self-custodial on the given institutions servers, the Node software harmonizes and standardizes the data into a common format, making it interoperable with a network of collaborators. The Node software thereby sources data from all providers and brings credible neutrality to the network; from this basis, developers can source data from a multitude of medical bodies and build any number of patient centric applications.
The first application built on AminoChain, is a peer to peer bio-sample marketplace called the “Specimen Center”. In the Specimen Center, biobank inventories and their associated data are harmonized into a common format, making research samples searchable and requestable across a network of providers.
As context, biobanks are storage facilities for human tissue used in scientific research or clinical applications. Biobanks are used by researchers who are looking to create cures for new and existing diseases, as well as studying a population’s health to help prevent future outbreaks of infectious disease.
However, biobanks suffer from a dire lack of interoperability; it takes an average of 8 weeks emailing back and forth before researchers find the samples they need, sign a licensing agreement, and a sample is shipped.
With Specimen Center biobanks can now give permission for researchers and collaborators to query their sample collections, and they can equally query for research assets available to them. Between institutions, users can streamline licensing agreements, track sample and data use, and maintain full provenance of biosamples across an interoperable network of biobanks.
The best part of all of this: any biobank can enable features that let their patients/ sample donors track where their samples go in the network, learn from the information generated on their samples, and earn money back whenever their samples are commercialized or sold. What separates the AminoChain Specimen Center from traditional biosample marketplaces is the ability to embed transparency and benefit-sharing with the very people that make the marketplace valuable: the patients. Our goal is to prove that you can create an incredibly successful business by placing bioethics at the heart of the business model; if you care for the patient experience first and foremost, then downstream, everyone in the industry will benefit.
2. Funding for research.
Biomedical discovery has long depended on centralized funding bodies like the NIH. But with budgets under pressure and thousands of grants cut, science can’t afford to rely on fragile pipelines. The AminoChain Protocol introduces new models for financing research: community-backed Collections, philanthropic sponsorships, and bonds that spread risk and open participation. Crucially, it reframes ownership - making data a shared asset rather than a locked resource. This creates sovereignty for communities, aligns incentives across stakeholders, and brings decentralization to a field that desperately needs resilience.
3. Licensing and customized access.
Finally, the protocol reimagines how data is used. Instead of sitting in silos or locked behind restrictive contracts, datasets can be licensed with clear, customizable agreements. Some projects may choose open access; others may allow exclusive use for a time before being recycled and re-licensed. This creates a living Data Lake — a marketplace where datasets are reused, repurposed, and initial costs are amortized over time. The result is a system where valuable knowledge isn’t wasted, and every contribution continues to generate impact long after the first discovery.
The protocol works through “Collections” — projects that gather data for specific diseases or research goals. Instead of waiting on shrinking government grants or unpredictable funding cycles, these Collections can be supported directly by sponsors, philanthropic donors, or even community bonds. Once the data is generated, access to it is managed through clear licensing rules, and royalties flow automatically back to the people and groups who made it possible. This way, research moves faster, and benefits are fairly shared.
At its heart, AminoChain isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about agency. Patients don’t just give once and walk away; they can re-engage, update their health information, and remain active partners over time. Researchers don’t just see a dataset; they see a living, evolving resource. And communities don’t just contribute; they help shape the science and share in its impact. That’s the promise of the AminoChain Protocol: a biobank designed for the people, by the people, and with the people.
To bring this vision to life, we’re proud to share that AminoChain will be building its protocol on Syndicate’s appchain infrastructure. Syndicate provides the secure, scalable, and flexible foundation we need to power everything from patient engagement to dataset licensing. Their infrastructure allows us to embed compliance, royalties, and benefit-sharing directly into the code — ensuring that trust isn’t just promised, but programmatically enforced. By joining forces with Syndicate, we’re not only building a decentralized biobank; we’re building one that can scale globally and endure.
This partnership is about more than technology. It’s about alignment. Like us, Syndicate believes in empowering communities and unlocking new models of ownership. Together, we’re building an infrastructure that ensures patients and advocacy groups are never sidelined, but instead remain central to the future of science. The AminoChain Protocol, powered by Syndicate, is a statement: the future of biomedical research will be open, participatory, and community-owned.
The launch of the AminoChain Protocol marks the start of this new story. In the months ahead, we’ll begin with the first patient-driven cohorts, in partnership with advocacy groups and research sites around the world. Together, we can prove that biobanking doesn’t have to be extractive — it can be participatory, ethical, and profoundly human. The future of biomedical research is one where communities aren’t just subjects of science, but co-authors of discovery.
Our Vision for the Future
While the Specimen Center is the first application built on AminoChain, and biobanks are the first institutions being connected, these are just the first examples of what applications can be built and how big the network can be.
Medical bodies in the AminoChain network will be able to benefit from decentralized applications in clinical recruitment, clinical trial management, decentralized AI and federated learning, to name a few examples. In a world where science and healthcare applications are becoming increasingly user owned and self-custodial, AminoChain will be a key coordination layer to connect disparate data sources with bio-medical enterprises.
Our vision is to build the world's first HIPAA and GDPR compliant blockchain for the healthcare industry - a platform on which any company, network, non-profit, or lone scientist can source and build with compliant healthcare data. AminoChain is building more than a platform to improve bio-sample distribution; we’re building an entirely new bioeconomy. Within this new economy our mission is to streamline clinical R&D, improve academic-industry partnerships, and above all, to have patients be the very first to benefit from their participation in scientific research.
To help us achieve this vision we’re thrilled to bring on two investors with very different areas of expertise - a16z crypto and Cercano. This $5M seed round led by a16z crypto, brings our total funding to date to $7M.
Having worked closely with the a16z crypto team through the CSX London accelerator, we’ve been incredibly impressed with their deep technical and operating expertise, and we’re excited to welcome them aboard. We’re also very excited to welcome Cercano to the cap table. Having worked closely with the Cercano team over the last few months, we’ve been particularly impressed with their depth and breadth of knowledge across the Life Sciences, and we’re excited to work closely with their connected partners.
If you are a world class engineer or developer, a die-hard operator, or a true wordsmith and visionary, we would love to have you apply to join us. We are currently hiring across a number of founding roles and attached are our open positions and career’s page primer. We can’t wait to hear from you, and we’re excited to have you join our mission of bringing trust to science and healthcare.
There is nothing more personal than your body.
Every year thousands of people do an incredible service to humanity by providing the medical community with samples of their blood, saliva, and cancer tissue to help researchers develop new lifesaving medicines that benefit all of us.
Unfortunately, today, the data collected from these highly sensitive and personal samples and data, is a one way street.
Bio-sample donors are asked if their sample can be used for scientific research, they sign a consent document, the researcher takes the bio-sample, and the two part ways and never see each other again. The journey of donated samples is a black box for donors, and consent rates at major institutions are now as low as 25%.
While this data has immense potential to drive medical breakthroughs and improve patient care, its centralized storage and control (1) put a massive drag on scientific progress and the improvement of patient outcomes, and (2) prevent provenance and users’ consent management.
Limited Sample Visibility & Accessibility
Most biobanks operate in silos, with no centralized system for researchers to search, compare, or request samples across multiple repositories. This lack of visibility leads to duplicated collections, wasted resources, and underutilized specimens, slowing down critical research.
Cumbersome & Bureaucratic Procurement Processes
The process of acquiring biospecimens is manual, fragmented, and painfully slow. Researchers must contact multiple biobanks, negotiate Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs), verify ethical approvals, and coordinate logistics – a process that often takes 8+ weeks for a single transaction.
Lack of Transparency & Compliance Oversight
Once a sample is collected, it often disappears into a “black box”, with little traceability on its future use. Donors remain uninformed about how their contributions are used, while institutions struggle to enforce consent terms and regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, IRB approvals).