On the Design of a Blockchain Platform for Clinical Trial and Precision Medicine

• Published in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems pp. 1972 - 1980
• Main Authors: Zonyin Shae, Tsai, Jeffrey J. P.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2017
• Subjects: Big Data; big data analytics; blockchain; clinical trial; Clinical trials; Computer architecture; data integration; data integrity; Data privacy; distributed and parallel computing; Distributed databases; identity privacy; IoT; Parallel processing; patient centric medicine; precision medicine
• ISSN: 1063-6927
• DOI: 10.1109/ICDCS.2017.61

This paper proposes a blockchain platform architecture for clinical trial and precision medicine and discusses various design aspects and provides some insights in the technology requirements and challenges. We identify 4 new system architecture components that are required to be built on top of traditional blockchain and discuss their technology challenges in our blockchain platform: (a) a new blockchain based general distributed and parallel computing paradigm component to devise and study parallel computing methodology for big data analytics, (b) blockchain application data management component for data integrity, big data integration, and integrating disparity of medical related data, (c) verifiable anonymous identity management component for identity privacy for both person and Internet of Things (IoT) devices and secure data access to make possible of the patient centric medicine, and (d) trust data sharing management component to enable a trust medical data ecosystem for collaborative research.