Rounding Out 2018, Project Shivom Goes Into High Gear
We develop our blockchain-based platform to target precision medicine.
As we enter the home stretch of 2018, Project Shivom celebrates an historic and successful ICO, expansion of our token exchange across four cryptocurrency platforms, and a restructured company leadership now helmed by CEO Henry Ines. Next, we look forward to exciting partnerships and projects that will help us fulfill our mission to protect patient identity, personalize healthcare and transform lives around the world. We are on the march to a new era in genomic science and precision medicine, from detection to delivery and anchored by unprecedented privacy.
One of the key challenges of successfully applying precision medicine in practice is the ability to properly integrate and interpret large amounts of genomic data to an accurate treatment. Of course, that involves both effective front-end collection of diverse data sets and then even more precise back-end analysis and application. The ability to properly interpret data is an ongoing challenge, particularly as there are not enough geneticists to do the job or the data that is collected often goes under or unutilized. Picture multiple highways funneling into one or two major roads — without the proper system, vehicles end up creating a bottleneck and then ultimately choose different roads altogether. This is the dissipation effect that prevents a solid connection between genomic and precision medicine. So, this takes time — to get the right people trained to analyze data, to get healthcare professionals to be able to understand and interpret the data, and then to have the right treatments available in a timely manner. During this time, data that is collected is stored — that brings up a whole other set of issues and security being the most significant one.
There is a recognition in the field that any new genomic science technology product must ultimately serve to make the collection to analysis road more effective, secure and able to more precisely connect patients with treatment. Shivom is in the midst of developing a platform that is broad, inclusive and focused on the healthcare needs of both large communities and individuals. As we’ve written previously, our goal is to utilize genomic data to better target individual treatments, alleviate specific diseases with high incidence in regions where it often goes undiagnosed, and improve the quality of healthcare worldwide. Most importantly, we are creating the building blocks to gather the most diverse patient data the global healthcare community has ever seen, and as securely as possible. But, a related focus is bridging the gap between collection and analysis, which we attempt to do with the application of AI technology.
In 2019, Project Shivom will begin sample data collection of sickle-cell disease bearers in Sub-Saharan Africa and those afflicted with type-2 diabetes in India. Both diseases, in which genetics plays a critical role, are ravaging susceptible populations in their respective regions. They are manageable with modern technology, but often go entirely undiagnosed, significantly worsening their impact on the individuals they afflict. Our partnerships will allow us to apply the most advanced, secure technology to collect patient data, sequence it, and analyze it. After we do this, users can share their unique set of genomic information with healthcare professionals and medical researchers. This will not only allow researchers to produce more advanced and affordable treatments, it will help them solve the particular issues that face marginalized communities that would otherwise go unstudied and untreated.
Our partnerships will play an integral role in helping to carry out our mission. In June, Project Shivom introduced two new partnerships that will help us further fuse blockchain and artificial intelligence to improve the quality of health for global citizens. The first, Our work with SingularityNET, will greatly increase our ability to offer personalized medical analytics by fusing our unmatched supply of data with their vast network of artificial intelligence solutions, allowing the medical world to solve problems with greater speed, certainty, and raw power than ever before. By bringing our powerful blockchain solution together with their potent AI platform, we will be able to combine two cutting edge technologies to provide unmatched possibility.
A second partnership with MeFy will aid us in growing global data sets in developing economies, helping us secure a more diverse database than any other on Earth. This partnership will be particularly valuable in India, where we will working directly with hospitals to gather data. This is just one step in our extended mission to provide access to the ability to draw data within underrepresented communities, contributing directly to our creation of a database that will provide answers not just for those who are already being researched but for communities who until now were criminally under-researched. Combined, the two platforms produce an expanded data hub that can better inform the pharmaceutical, medical and health insurance communities to produce the most targeted, effective patient treatments.
As 2018 nears its final stretch, Shivom is focused on developing their genomic medicine technology to help connect areas that have until now been disconnected and to support the medical research community in creating life-saving breakthroughs. At the end of the day, it’s people and patients who will benefit.
