Cats in the blockchain. Part 2
How information technologies could save pets
Previously we found out that creating a sufficient database to search for genetic markers of diseases in cats and dogs is a difficult matter. It requires joint efforts of scientists, owners, breeders, veterinarians. Until now there was no tool or platform by which all of them could exchange data.
Geneticists and bioinformaticians work independently, sometimes duplicating studies that has been already done. The research results of pharma labs is a trade secret. Pet owners and breeders have a valuable information about pets’ pedigree and health conditions throughout life. But they rarely use expensive genetic tests for pets diagnostics. Needless to say they do not crowd the doors of laboratories to provide their data to scientists.
HealthyTail aims to solve all these problems at once by means of information technologies. We create a digital platform for data exchange between pet owners, breeders, scientists and pharma. Together we could form the world’s largest distributed database with genetic and medical information about domestic cats and dogs. Collecting all the information in the consolidated database with the access from anywhere in the world will boost the pets genetic studies. Scientists will get a huge amount of unique data and it will not require a space budget. The owners and breeders will finally get genetic diagnostics for pets. The accuracy of that diagnostic tool will constantly grow but the price will decrease.
Hereditary diseases diagnostics is not the only result. Over time we will be able to predict the pets predisposition to such chronic health conditions and complex diseases as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases. Pharmaceutical companies could use the data to design new effective drugs including gene therapy that can treat not the symptoms but the cause of the disorder. In the end the genetic mechanisms underlying aging and determining the life expectancy will be revealed.
The data will be stored and processed by a whole computer network created by the HealthyTail members. A kind of “super virtual computer”: its total computing resources will be much more than of any laboratory or research site.
It’s clear that such an ambitious project can not be developed only by enthusiasm. Therefore we built the HealthyTail economy on the basis of the blockchain technology. TAILS is a virtual token (or cryptotoken) that is created for motivation in HealthyTail ecosystem. If member enter the information into database they earn TAILS tokens. If they obtain some information, e.g. estimation of future health condition of an animal or access to the database, they pay by TAILS tokens.
But blockchain is not only a payment tool. It will be used to share data access between community members and will make this process reliable and trustworthy for all parties. The blockchain technology excludes the human factor and data ivory towers. Moreover it allows to track leaks of data and protect it from frauds.
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