Over the past few decades, there have been significant increases in research and development efforts toward the cure of terminal diseases. The healthcare space has seen significant development as new technologies have come to take the place of old ones, and this has led to several impressive breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases across the board. For this very reason, many are now leaning heavily on the possible use of blockchain technology for improved healthcare research. Blockchain has quickly emerged as one of the most innovative technologies in the world, with applications across multiple fields - including business, governance, and even education. However, while there is no doubt that blockchain will be one of the pivotal technologies of tomorrow’s internet landscape, its application for healthcare innovation has been somewhat stifled. Up until this moment, most of blockchain’s application has been focused on financial innovation. Whether it is the backing of cryptocurrencies or the foundation of decentralized finance (DeFi), most blockchain developers appear more focused on using innovative technology to solve the biggest issues we have with money. Still, blockchain is functional for more than this - especially as the world continues to look for innovations in the healthcare space. And, now that Amrit A.G. is getting ready for its massive rollout of the Amrit Ecosystem, there is a distinct possibility that blockchain could finally help to deliver high-quality research geared towards solving incurable and terminal diseases. Amrit A.G., through the Amrit ecosystem, is looking to bring one of the biggest benefits of blockchain technology to the medical space - improving trust in the research process and enabling decentralized science. The platform was built on the belief that data is indeed life, and that the world needs high-quality, accurate data as everyone now focuses on the treatment of cancer and other incurable disorders. It also ensures that the true benefit of data licensing and research flows back to the patients with complete transparency. Based in Switzerland, Amrit A.G. was built on the premise that researchers in the oncology field will continue to need high-quality data. In this interview, we spoke to the company’s Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Ashwin Rathod about its innovation. 1: What was the primary reason you saw with oncology that made you want to launch the Amrit ecosystem? When my close friend’s dad was diagnosed with oral cancer, we were stranded and helpless with no access to accurate, unbiased information. All across the internet, wherever we searched for the information was biased, often ripe with misinformation and ad-driven search results or driving propagandas. We lost him to cancer because we were delayed in the treatment and finding the right expert and site for his treatment. This happens to millions of people across the world especially in the developing countries where access to healthcare and life-saving information is not easy. I took a lead to change this situation and hence co-founded Amrit A.G. (previously OncoCoin A.G.) to create an ecosystem focused on patient empowerment and giving them total control over their data. Thanks to blockchain and cryptography we are able to create an ecosystem that uses encryption and anonymity as the basis of trust thereby enabling the patients to drive the research ground up. 2: What inefficiencies are plaguing the research process right now? For decades humanity has been plagued with the inefficiencies in drug discovery and bringing out treatments to the market, especially for incurable and terminal diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, etc… Every year $200B is spent by big pharma on research and development and yet only 50 drugs get an approval every year. One of the major reasons is the disconnect between patients and researchers mainly due to the lack of transparency involving use (or misuse) of patient’s healthcare data. As a result, we have precious healthcare data residing in silos which cannot be utilized for the research. We believe blockchain and Decentralized ID-based solutions like the Amrit Ecosystem could hold the key to break this gap of trust. 3: Are there plans to use the Amrit ecosystem in partnership with hospitals and research facilities in the future? Yes, we are already working with hospitals, labs, and other data aggregators in order to ensure that the data can be used for specific research purposes without the patients being identified and also with their consent. The partner Apps launched on Amrit Ecosystem and various healthcare stakeholders can provide their services and host research projects on the ecosystem which helps the patient community to avail these life-saving services from the partners and apps in the ecosystem. I believe that the way forward would be to have distributed web nodes and decentralized ID-based access to researchers with patient consent at the core of the solution. Currently, various healthcare partners in Asia and Europe and apps from across the world are rapidly growing fueled by a fluid integration of the service layer and vice-versa. Our vision is to bring all the healthcare stakeholders as a collective where we want to slowly pass on the decision-making through a robust consensus mechanism where every stakeholder can contribute to the growth of the ecosystem and also patients could stake their RWD to catapult the success of a project and also benefit from the value created thereby. 4: Is cancer research the endgame? Or do you see Amrit expanding to other forms of medical research? Oncology is surely a starting point however we already have scaled up to Neurology related disorders and in the near future, we are targeting other therapeutic areas (TA) aimed towards alternative therapies, preventive care, and precision medicine. Having said that, our goal is to have comprehensive coverage of services and projects from every stakeholder in healthcare. We have been able to showcase enormous scalability across dimensions like TA, geographies, services, multi-modal healthcare data types, and much more. This is possible through our patented AI algorithms and robust and highly scalable service layers. As of today, we have more than 67 granted patents and 125+ filed patents which I believe is a stupendous achievement for a startup like us. 5: How have you navigated the medical field in terms of regulations surrounding the application of blockchain technology? We are at the forefront of creating something unique that has never been done before and we want a sustainable and inclusive path forward. Speaking of the regulations around blockchain and cryptocurrencies, we are of the opinion that these regulations are still maturing and most of the geographies are trying to formulate holistic policies which is a welcome step. The pace at which blockchain and cryptocurrencies have evolved in just the past couple of years is truly astounding and the innovations that appear every day are revolutionizing multiple industry sectors, especially the healthcare, finance, communications, and internet as a whole. This also poses a challenge for the regulators to ensure that citizens are not adversely affected by misleading information. While most of the governments are aligned with the benefits of the blockchain technology and cryptography, some are also cautious of the implications of absolute privacy, money laundering, terror financing, and other illicit activities including financial scams. Compliance with local and global regulations is paramount to our expansion strategy. To that effect, we employ only the best of the legal teams specialized in various aspects ranging from KYC, AML checks, data privacy, security, anonymity and sovereignty, patient data handling and storage, laws of doing business, regional marketing and communication guidelines, and much more. We are also ISO27001 certified, HIPAA compliant and use end-to-end AES256 bit encryption which is also recommended by the National Security Advisor(NSA) to the US Govt.
