Co-founders of Nebula Genomics Kamal Obbad and Dennis Grishin were invited to speak about the Nebula platform at BioData World West 2018 on March 13, 2018. BioData World West is a closed conference focusing on big data, precision medicine, and AI in healthcare and features speakers that include leaders from the pharma, biotech, and healthcare industries as well as from academia.
Our founders made up two out of the four featured speakers in the blockchain track at the conference, alongside executives from Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. We discussed the myriad ways that the Nebula platform provides value to data contributors such as individuals and biobanks, data buyers in pharma and academia, and to the healthcare space as a whole. The platform helps individuals and biobanks maintain ownership of and monetize their genomic data through the implementation of secure computing and blockchain technologies and by allowing data buyers to subsidize sequencing. It addresses the issue of genomic data fragmentation by aggregating genomic data from both individuals and databanks in a standardized format. Finally, it allows data buyers such as those in pharma and academia to more efficiently assemble cohorts by improving their access to phenotypic data associated with genomic data.
The Nebula team also met individually with various leaders in pharma and academia to gain insight into issues they have had working with and making use of biodata. Some issues they expressed to us were the complexities of gaining access to EHRs from different healthcare providers to pair with genomic data and the regulatory complexities of giving buyers access to those EHRs. A prominent issue that repeatedly came up was that large genomic data holders such as biobanks often spend considerable resources gathering data but then have difficulty monetizing it due to the inefficient process of having to individually negotiate deals with data buyers, often requiring long periods of correspondence and invoking costly legal fees. Nebula will greatly simplify this process by allowing biobanks to integrate their data with our platform and maintain ownership of it while providing a simple approval process to give data buyers access to their data in exchange for payment. Additionally, all transactions will be executed by smart contracts on a blockchain for enhanced efficiency.
We will continue to communicate with leaders of industry and academia in continued pursuit of our goal to overcome the obstacles slowing the effective utilization of genomic data to advance precision medicine and healthcare as a whole.
Author : erwin_ibrahim
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