(From Wired Magazine, February 21, 2018)
Solve Genomics With The Blockchain?
By Adam Rodgers, Wired Magazine
SCIENTISTS LUST AFTER genomes like the wolf from a Tex Avery cartoon, heart pounding in throat, tongue lolling, fist pounding on the table, submarine-dive-ahOOOgah!-alarm sounding—all out of desire for the hot, hot data curled coaxingly inside every one of your cells.
Think of all the information tucked into those sinuous DNA spirals—and the life-saving discoveries that some smart machine learning could pull out if it had lots and lots and lots of it to learn from. But first, researchers need a lot of genomes. The bigger the database, the better—only about a million people have taken it all off, as it were, and gotten their whole genomes sequenced. Even though about 12 million people have gotten at least some of their genes unravelled—mostly by companies like 23andme or Ancestry—that level of detail isn’t enough for a precision-medicine future. But it’s getting easier: Ten years ago a whole genome cost $10 million a pop; today it’s more like $1,000.
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To be fair, the companies starting up in this space all say they have approaches to deal with these security and privacy concerns. The technology is still developing. For now, though, it’s a weakness. “Data is not a single piece of currency. It’s reusable….once you reveal the data, it’s just data,” says Bradley Malin, director of the Health Data Science Center at Vanderbilt University. “So you’re going to have to ask the question of, how do you know they’re not copying it and moving it elsewhere? The blockchain doesn’t stop that.”