Using Blockchain to Democratize Science
How the DeSci Community revolutionized research funding and data security.
In our society, there are three main avenues that we can continue to learn about and expand: the physical on Earth, the extraterrestrial, and the digital. With a lot of our planet already being explored besides the deep chasms of the oceans and space exploration being far too complex for our current technology, the digital landscape is the most intriguing space for growth in our near future. With AI revolutionizing the speed at which we can work at, we are approaching a new digital revolution.
With our previous digital revolution being marked with the formation of the World Wide Web and connecting all the devices in the world, this one is focused on the development of tools that can optimize our lives.
In the world of biotech, we have three new categories of important technology: lab automation and AI, DNA synthesis and CRISPR, and genomics. With AI, we are now able to make far more precise measurements and model biology more efficiently. AI, if used correctly, may be the best tool available for predicting the complex and nonlinear dynamics of cells.
Furthermore, DNA synthesis technologies make it possible to write new DNA. CRISPR, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, gives us “genetic scissors'' or the ability to edit specific bases of DNA programmatically. CRISPR allows us to imagine curing a genetic disease by editing the dysfunctional gene back to a functional state.
Finally, between 1990 and 2003, scientists around the world coordinated to produce the first reference map of the human genome, costing nearly $3B. Since then, DNA sequencing has decreased in cost faster than any other technology in human history. DNA sequencing is the process of obtaining the exact sequence of nucleotides, or bases, in a DNA molecule, meaning that it is becoming ever easier to collect data and understand our body.
With these tools, we can clearly see how the development of new tools has greatly improved our industries and made research far easier.
Another application for technology in this digital revolution has been giving a voice to the scientific community.
Problem:
Most research is done by universities with huge amounts of funding and resources available to them. Leading investigators are becoming increasingly older while far less young people are able to assume this position, revealing signs of bureaucratic stagnation and that people are unwilling to accept change and new leadership. Research and funding should be democratized, with labs outside of academic institutions having their fair share of funding and opportunity to pursue their research.
Solution:
Establishment of the DeSci community, seeking to use blockchain to provide funding for research groups. While blockchain and cryptocurrency may not be as exciting of a topic with the FTX crisis, blockchain has many more uses beyond the speculative cryptocurrencies and the many scam projects that we typically associate it with. The DeSci community has a goal to: “build public infrastructure for funding, creating, reviewing, crediting, storing, and spreading scientific knowledge fairly and equitably using the Web3 stack.” The Web3 stack refers to all of the technology and services used to build an application. While Web2 applications rely on centralized databases, Web3 applications are built on top of blockchain architectures for trustless and permissionless access.
Several questions that the DeSci community is trying to tackle include:
Is it possible to utilize crypto capital markets as a means of financing ambitious scientific projects?
In what ways can NFTs contribute to simplifying and accelerating the process of scientific commercialization?
Can Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) effectively facilitate the organization of productive online research communities?
One project in the DeSci community that is attempting to solve this problem is Molecule’s IP-NFT. Intellectual Property (IP) is a crucial method for turning scientific research into marketable products that people can get behind funding. Patents are specifically the way in which labs commercialize their research. A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time. Currently, patents are primarily generated by university labs because they are the main groups that perform research in the scientific community. If the patent has commercial potential, companies can negotiate with the university’s tech transfer office (TTO) to license or sell the IP. University spin-outs are specific companies created to transform technological inventions developed from university research that are likely to not be used to their maximum benefit otherwise. University spin-outs recognize the potential of a lab's research and can provide the proper resources and time required to transform this research into a marketable product that can generate a lot of profit. This entire process of licensing an IP has many real inefficiencies and most IP’s remain dormant, never becoming an actual product. Thus, Paul Kolhaas, co-founder and CEO of Molecule, proposed the idea “What if instead of using NFTs for trading pictures of monkeys, we used them to solve a real problem like creating a more fluid IP marketplace?”
With the core IP-NFT protocol being a complicated legal and technical innovation, it is perhaps better to examine its use cases to better understand the technology. The Scheibye-Knudsen Group at the University of Copenhagen ran a large-scale analysis on the impact of prescription drugs on survival. Using a dataset containing 1.5 billion prescriptions from 4.8 million individuals, they identified a set of over ten drugs correlated with extending human lifespan. They followed this by minting or posting their findings as an IP-NFT using the Molecule protocol. Their NFT was then bought by VitaDAO, a web3 community focused on funding longevity research. This transaction will provide the funding for a new study focused “on optimizing, repurposing, and re-formulating the three drugs with the strongest effect on human lifespan.” A DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization is a form of legal structure that has no central governing body and whose members share a common goal to act in the best interest of the entity. People who own the token of the blockchain participate in the management and decision-making. All votes and activity through the DAO are posted on a blockchain, making all the actions of users publicly viewable. VitaDAO is funded by venture capitalists, showing how there is still interest in the blockchain space despite the overall bearish attitude towards cryptocurrencies.
With infrastructure like the IP-NFT protocol, more science DAOs are starting to emerge. Now, way more people are able to get involved where previously only university students or professors received adequate funding for their ideas. Looking at the work of IP-NFT and many other projects such as LabDAO, there is a clear motive to create a web3 toolkit that allows communities to easily form around whatever they want to research and actually make things happen. DeSci is working to give anybody with an Internet connection the ability to participate in cutting-edge research. No longer will your location matter in regards to your resources, the DeSci community is working to accomplish a vision where all of your resources are online and readily available. There will be no barrier between your ideas and actually starting a research project, working to solve problems that you care about. Combining the ideals of the crypto community in permissionless entrance and community ownership with the excitement of the scientific community, there are infinite potential experiments that can be done and I am for one extremely excited for what our future holds.
Looking at the intersection between blockchain and science, I was surprised by the variety of projects that are already starting to form. One project that caught my eye was a paper from a program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Yale University. In this paper, they outlined using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain to securely store and share pharmacogenomics data. Smart contracts are simply programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. They are typically used to automate the execution of an agreement so that all participants can be immediately certain of the outcome, without any intermediary’s involvement or time loss. Pharmacogenomics data, which is just simply genetic information that is relevant to understanding how an individual's genes influence their response to medications, is extremely vital for prescribing the correct drugs to a patient. Thus, it is of the utmost importance to store this data securely in robust places like smart contracts. Smart contracts allow for researchers and physicians to share their data with select people while also ensuring that their data is not unintentionally leaked or lost. Blockchain is thus growing in popularity as a promising solution to solve secure data storage problems because of its decentralization, distributed architecture, and immutable linking. The reason why decentralization is important is because it prevents any single user from controlling all the data; similarly, distributed architecture means that many components of the system are located on different networks or computers, thus eliminating a single point of failure. Finally, immutable linking prevents alteration of past records, preventing anyone with malicious intent to corrupt the data or any accidental mistakes.
This group aimed to develop an Ethereum smart contract for storing and querying pharmacogenomics data with time and memory efficiency. While blockchain technology offers many useful features, it is notoriously inefficient and slow when it comes to storing and sending data. They overcome this issue by using an index-based, multi-mapping data structure in a Solidity (the language that smart contracts are written in) smart contract to store the data. Specifically, they stored all pharmacogenomics data in a database mapping in which the key is an index and the value is a part of the data. They also stored three other indexes where the key is a different field (gene name, variant number, and drug name respectively), and the value is an array holding the indexes that go into the main database and match the particular field of the keys.
The group also developed an alternate solution to account for scalability called “fastQuery,” which makes use of a similar query algorithm as mentioned above, but instead organizes the gene-variant-drug relations every time someone searches for it rather than when the data is first added. This fastQuery solution exhibited significantly increased time efficiency, about one to three times faster.
When testing both of their algorithms, they found that their first solution required around 70 seconds, 500 MB of memory, and 80 MB of disk space to insert 1000 entries into the dataset. They also found that it took 400 milliseconds and 5MB of memory to send 1000 entries. This constant memory for insertion and querying meant that their algorithm is capable of handling extremely large datasets without an issue. For their alternate fastQuery solution, it required 6o seconds, 500 MB of memory, and 80 MB of disk space to insert 1000 entries while only taking 83 milliseconds and 5 MB of memory to send 1000 entries. These results confirm their theory that their second algorithm was indeed a faster solution for querying data.
Reflecting on their study, it again showcased the potential of blockchain as a resource for the scientific community. This group's approach could be used for storing data beyond pharmacogenomics such as anything that is highly important to a research team and needs to be stored securely. While blockchain is a nascent technology, it is showing signs of not just being a fad and actually having a place in biotechnology and the scientific community at large.