/Introducing AminoChain

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.

Enter AminoChain.

AminoChain is a technology that connects enterprise medical institutions and on which healthcare applications can be built, and provides patients with the transparency to finally know what is happening with their donations to society.

At 12 years old, I was thrown into the world of healthcare as I was diagnosed with a malignant melanoma. Waking up from the surgery, I remember the doctor standing over my bed, holding the biopsy sample. Enthralled, I asked him if I could take it home and show it to my friends at school, and he kindly explained that they would have to keep it so that they can study how tumors form and spread. My mom, not thinking anything of it, happily signed a consent document and we never saw the sample again.

Nearly a decade and a half later as a budding scientist, I was in the lab at Columbia holding another patient's sample, when it hit me. I was holding something that belonged to a human being, generating immensely valuable data on them and their condition, and they had no idea about any of it.

Science today treats informed consent documents as an exchange of ownership; patients sign away their rights to sample use, and de-identification standards cut patients out of any equitably benefit from their donation to science. Reflecting on how easy it was for me to donate such a valuable asset, I have ever since been determined to build a better system for others. When I learnt about blockchain technology, it was a no-brainer that this was the perfect solution to bring ownership, equity, and access from the biomedical industry back to patients.

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.

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.