The explosion of genomic data and the rise of precision medicine is transforming healthcare as we know it.

Precision medicine is an emerging approach to medical care that uses an individuals’ phenotypes and genotypes to tailor disease treatment and prevention. Its full potential lies in enabling medical practitioners to access and evaluate more specific information about their patients – otherwise known as genomic data – so that they can recommend the right therapeutics strategies.

While there is understandable excitement about the promise, there are also some significant challenges that must be overcome if it is to become mainstream. 

One of the big barriers holding back precision medicine is the health systems’ ability to store and access large amounts of data, safely and securely. While data storage technology, such as the cloud, offers solutions to access such data from any place and device, the security and data integrity, have not yet been addressed.

As precision medicine becomes increasingly integral to our healthcare system, the industry will no doubt face a number of technical and ethical challenges; how can we ensure the privacy of genetic data? How can we be trusted to share this data safely? And ultimately who owns this data? 

Any long-term genomic data storage solution will need to guarantee individuals have control and protection of their data, whilst at the same time provide access to clinicians and biomedical researchers.

This is where blockchain comes in. 

 

Source: European Pharmaceutical Manufacturer