Most of us have heard about how cryptocurrencies and decentralized technologies can revolutionize the current state of society through crowdsourcing. However, most large-scale real-world applications have come in the form of cryptocurrencies as an alternate asset class. Huge, influential companies like Tesla and Amazon are in talks to start or have already started accepting cryptocurrencies as payment. But few companies have ventured beyond financial decentralization.
OncoCoin seeks to bring the power of decentralized crowdsourcing to the world of oncology. OncoCoin is a cancer ecosystem that revolutionizes cancer patients’ participation in their cancer journey. As a symbiotic result of bringing this user journey experience to cancer patients, they generate high quality, decentralized, and analyzable patient data that can be used to further cancer research.
Unavailability of information for cancer patients
One of the biggest problems facing cancer patients right now is the unavailability of critical information to help them through their cancer journey. Data clearly shows that patients who are more informed and are empowered to manage their disease report a better standard of care. Access to this information is difficult for patients to access and distill what is relevant.
Through CURIA, patients have access to their options for treatments, clinical trials, and cancer experts; each tailored to their cancer type, stage, and demographics. OncoCoin ensures this information is completely reliable, using AI, quality checked by a human care-team to pull from sources such as regulatory bodies, clinical trial registries, and hospital websites. Through the Ecosystem, patients can also access an online second opinion and a focused cancer community. All of this puts patients in the best place to take control of their cancer journey and get the best outcome possible.
Licensing Real-World Data
Apart from the unavailability of reliable and tailored information for patients, there is another fundamental problem. The speed of drug discovery in Oncology is moving too slowly. Patient data could be the key to solving this, helping researchers uncover new avenues for research instead of using outdated old trails. However, this patient data exists in silos, oftentimes in isolated centralized systems like hospitals. OncoCoin wants to take a decentralized approach to crowdsourcing patient data to solve these problems, through a patient-facing application with a community of over 200,000 users, including patients and their family members.
The Ecosystem works by allowing patients to licence their data to specific research projects of their choice. Patients can share information such as doctor’s letters, lab reports, blood reports, and also answer quality of life surveys. To protect patient data, OncoCoin is HIPPA and GDPR compliant. All of this data is encrypted on the blockchain according to the highest industry encryption standards. Furthermore, this data is completely anonymised before being shared with researchers, so no personal identity information is shared. Due to the licensing method, patients keep hold of the ownership of their information and the recipients and terms under which the data can be used are embedded in the smart contract.
By giving researchers access to Real World Data when they need it, OncoCoin speeds the process of hypothesis identification for clinical trials, quality assurance, and quality-of-life assessments for patients. By combining real-world insights with AI, drug discovery can be significantly accelerated. Furthermore, it can increase the likelihood of a therapy being approved at the end of the clinical trial process.
Bringing all stakeholders together
OncoCoin is a thriving ecosystem for patients and other stakeholders, empowering them with critical information and leveraging their data equitably to fight cancer. The OncoCoin ecosystem consists of:
- Patients and families: Receive tokens for providing their data. These tokens can be used to buy products and services on the platforms or can be donated.
- Patient advocacy groups: Receive donations that can be used to facilitate discovery and other programs for patients.
- Pharma: Runs surveys where participants can be incentivized through tokens. Additionally, it can be used to license data in and out.
- Regulators and Insurers: Run objective analysis and surveys to build safer auditing and control systems.
- Digital Therapeutics: Other apps offering services which could support cancer patients (mental health, diet advice, aesthetics) can offer their services through the app.
- Inventors and philanthropists can purchase tokens and trade them on a secondary exchange as an asset for investing. Philanthropists can donate these assets back to the ecosystem
OncoCoin powers the ecosystem
OncoCoin is not only an ubiquitous ecosystem, but it also seeks to make its presence felt in the field of cancer research globally. To incentivize the use of OncoCoin on the platform, users will have prohibitive opportunity costs to transact in the fiat world. Users can pay for in-app services with coins they have earned, or new coins purchased on the secondary market.
The platform will grow for all stakeholders and services, limitlessly providing a symbiotic space for partners and applications to work together to find cures for one of the world’s biggest unsolved illnesses.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
