Informatics
Continued from page 55
24 Disclaimer: Curlew Research staff act as professional advisors to Encrypgen LLC. 25
https://www.limswiki.org/ index.php/Scientific_data_mana gement_system. 26
http://go.nature.com/2toIbSl. 27
https://tierion.com/. 28 Depositing the hash of a file on to a public blockchain does not constitute
publication of the data or the results contained with the file. 29 (a)
https://figshare.com/; (b)
http://about.zenodo.org/. 30
https://bitcoin.org/en/ bitcoin-paper. 31 (a) http://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/10.1207/s15516709co g2102_1/epdf; (b) http://
csmres.co.uk/cs.public.upd/arti cle-downloads/Khanna.pdf; (c)
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/ WileyTitle/productCd-
0470917377.html; (d)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/s even-pharma-companies-
partner-gates-153531737.html. 32 (a)
https://www.linkedin. com/pulse/blockchain-use-cases- healthcare-anca-petre – use- case #2; (b) https://f1000
research.com/articles/6-66/v3; (c)
https://www.forbes.com/ sites/reenitadas/2017/05/08/doe s-blockchain-have-a-place-in- healthcare – use-cases #1 & #4. 33
https://f1000research.com/ articles/5-222/v3. 34 Zestril® and Crestor®, both licensed by Zeneca Pharmaceuticals (now AstraZeneca) from Merck and Sumitomo respectively – both went on to be ‘blockbuster’ drugs. 35
https://medium.com/ blockchain-dreams/smart- contracts-101-really-smart- 59f76cdd06ef. 36
http://www.alamut.com/ subj/economics/nick_szabo/sm
artContracts.html. 37
https://ethereum.org/ foundation. 38
https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Stored_procedure. 39
http://hplusmagazine.com/ 2015/11/18/blockchain- technology-smart-contracts- and-smart-property/.
Continued from page 57 56 Drug Discovery World Fall 2017
my own time in Big Pharma are lisinopril and rosuvastatin34. Licensing in the R&D environment does not have to just involve compounds. Technology and IP – from the use of software and content to scientific techniques, and to the use of high-tech equipment – can all be subject to licens- ing under a variety of different contractual models, eg fixed price, measured usage, named users, roy- alties, ‘all-you-can-eat’, etc. Licensing is governed by the contract that sits behind the deal. Blockchain technology has huge potential in the governing and management of contracts through the use of so-called ‘smart contracts’35, which grew from ideas initially put forward by Nick Szabo in the 1990s36. The DLT smart contract (SC) approach has been pioneered by the Ethereum Foundation37. In essence, DLT SCs combine the concepts of classical contract law with the ‘stored procedure’ ideas of traditional database technolo- gy38 but using blockchain technology. The blockchain checks that certain key contractual conditions have been met, and then enforces the subsequent contractual commitments automatical- ly. To describe this in a little more detail39:
“A contract is an agreement between two or more people involving conditional commitments, ie: “If you do X for me, I will do Y for you.” A legal con- tract makes those conditional commitments legally enforceable. If you fail to do X for me, I can take you to court and have you ordered to do X, or ordered to pay me compensation for failing to do X. A smart contract is effectively the same, only you use some technological infrastructure to ensure that conditions have been met and/or to automatically enforce commitments. This can be done using blockchain technology because the dis- tributed ledger system can be used to confirm whether contractual conditions have been met.”
So if, for example, a pre-clinical drug candidate
is cross-licensed from Institution ‘A’ to Pharma ‘B’ with royalty payments from ‘B’ to ‘A’ being depen- dent on say, compound submission to the FDA, this can be encoded as a smart contract. Then, as soon as the regulatory package has been received by the FDA, a payment is made. In the clinical tri- als domain, the use of smart contracts to manage billing and reduce fraudulent claims has also been proposed as a beneficial use-case for DLT in healthcare32c. Patient recruitment to a trial could also be subject to a DLT SC such that the moment the target for genuine trial recruits has been reached by a physician or healthcare organisation, some sort of remuneration to that doctor or hospi- tal could automatically be enabled. Another possi- ble example of the use of DLT SCs (not just in healthcare and not just in R&D) could be pay-as- you-go usage of software or of a high-tech scientif- ic instrument40.
I have given just a few examples of the potential for blockchain-enabled smart contracts in the healthcare domain, but the huge growth in the use of the Ethereum blockchain over the last six to nine months (as measured by the increase in value of ‘ether’, the coin or token that enables one to use the Ethereum blockchain41) is evidence of the mas- sive interest in DLT SCs in many industries, not just in healthcare. Time will tell where the more specific value-added uses of blockchain-based smart contracts in healthcare will make their mark.
7. Electronic signatures
The digital signing of documents has become ubiq- uitous in modern-day business, not just across healthcare but across multiple industries. Wherever it is critical for an individual or an organisation or even an electronic device to affix ‘something’ which confirms their identity to a doc- ument, a file, or to an experiment, etc – in this modern digital age, that ‘something’ now takes the form of a digital signature. A natural consequence
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