Caifeng Gene to Create Genomic Data Exchange with Kaleido
Kaleido announces a collaboration with Shanghai-based health company Caifeng Gene to build a blockchain-based genomic data exchange to help address rising diabetes rates in China. The joint effort will result in better coordination, efficiency, transparency, and control over health data as the country moves to help prevent and manage diabetes among citizens.
China currently has 110 million diabetes patients, accounting for 10% of the total adult population. In the next twenty years, estimates place the patient size at 150 million, resulting in stress on medical institutions and public health services. Metabolic Syndrome — a collection of biochemical abnormalities often associated with eventual development of type II diabetes — is even more severe in the country, estimated to currently affect 450 million patients.
Caifeng Gene — founded in April 2018 by renowned bioinformatics Ph.D Lifeng Tian — aims to use precision medicine to combat the growing diabetes prevalence in China. Specifically, the Shanghai-based company is working with a nearby municipal government to establish the Center of Precision Medicine. The institute will provide personalized treatment and prevention plans for current and and at-risk diabetes patients. Through collaborations with top medical institutions in China, Caifeng Gene will offer services to better diagnose and treat diabetes in early stages as well as prevent the development in predisposed individuals.
Caifeng Gene Consortium on the Blockchain
Caifeng is collaborating with Kaleido, The Blockchain Business Cloud — to provide diabetes services through a first-of-its-kind genomic data sequencing, collection, analytics and permissioned data exchange. Using Kaleido’s platform, Caifeng will establish a consortium — a group of hospitals, labs, and clinics — who will use the blockchain to efficiently communicate data and provide unique treatment and prevention plans privy to the health information placed on the blockchain. These individual entities will all be able to submit their data directly to the blockchain, improving efficiency within the health industry. Importantly, the platform will be a private-permissioned blockchain, meaning the actors and their identities must be approved before accessing the blockchain or the data hosted on it. Moreover, patients and organizations who place their data on the exchange will be able to control which consortium entities have permission to access, see, and/or use that information.
The creation of a consortium will establish three primary tenets to the Caifeng Gene project: immutability, coordination, and transparency. Currently, data coordination between parties can be messy, prone to delays, subject to manipulation, and obscure. The establishment of a consortium allows multiple parties to interoperate seamlessly by submitting data to a standard, single, yet distributed data exchange. Leveraging the immutability of blockchain technology, Caifeng Gene aims to alleviate concerns that, as the central owner of patients’ data, they would be able to manipulate data. Moreover, knowing all the entities within the consortium allows for transparency into who accessed what data when, ensuring private data is used responsibly and carefully.
“With Kaleido and Consensys APAC, we have found a renowned partner who accompanies us on our journey and a proven platform to help deliver and accelerate blockchain based data sovereignty and permissioned exchange scenarios that will lead to faster diabetes medical discoveries through precise diagnosis and dramatically improving the public health on this particular population.”
— Lifeng Tian, Ph.D and CEO of Caifeng Gene
Secure Data and Identity on the Caifeng Gene Blockchain Exchange
The blockchain exchange will primarily host two groups of data — the Diabetes Reference Cohort and patients’ diagnostic data. The Diabetes Reference Cohort is a collection of data points that establish a barometer for the biochemical statistics of the Chinese population. By comparing patients to this Reference Cohort, health providers can more accurately identify those at risk for diabetes and provide evidence-based precision medical treatment plans for existing patients.
The practice of measuring a community or group’s overall health statistics in order to accurately provide services to an individual of that group has been previously legitimized through Caifeng Gene team’s prior work. By establishing a community-wide understanding of risk, medical providers can provide more personalized treatment and prevention plans for Chinese individuals whose genomic sequencing placed them above, at, or below the average insulin resistance level for their community. Caifeng Gene will leverage blockchain to extend this methodology to new boundaries by gathering a population-wide understanding of biochemical statistics for ethnic Chinese off of which to determine an individual’s susceptibility or unique treatment requirements.
Unique to the Caifeng Gene blockchain — and to blockchain technology in general — is the ability for patients to see and control which third parties have access to their data. Members of the consortium will include companies that provide patients with a full genome-sequencing. A full human genome sequence is too large and sensitive to place on the blockchain. A record of the transactions, however — i.e. which labs and doctors of the consortium have access to which parts of a patient’s genome — is available to and can be managed by the patient. This allows the patient to ensure s/he has complete control over the visibility of his/her biochemical information. This degree of transparency alongside security and multi-party coordination has previously been impossible. On the importance of data protection, Lifeng states, “This is a significant venture dealing with breakthrough application and analytics of individual genomics at scale, and the sharing, protection and monetization of their own data with pharma and biotech companies that are looking to harness it for medical research and development.”
Looking Ahead for Caifeng Gene
Caifeng Gene has taken the first steps towards providing personalized treatment for rising diabetes numbers while simultaneously promoting coordination among health services and sovereignty of patients’ data. Chinese diabetes patients and at-risk citizens will be the first to benefit from the unique data richness and protection that Caifeng Gene blockchain exchange will provide. The use case for the consortium-model blockchain in China’s (inter)national medical services, however, is far from limited to diabetes. Other medical conditions that require specialized, personalized treatment or prevention — including, but certainly not limited to, cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease — can all benefit from coordinated data exchange. When medical entities can more efficiently interoperate and patients feel in control of their own biochemical data, opportunities for previously-unavailable treatments and health services arise. Caifeng Gene, in collaboration with Kaleido, has a fascinating future ahead as it helps forge health services in the decentralized future.
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