Problem:
There is a problem in the medical and bioscience system today: legal and strategic reasons make it very hard to combine datasets. The data is “siloed” and protected in the individual strongholds of each company, sometimes even within company departments. This problem has been known for years: the government has spent over $2 billion to address it, with limited success.
Solution:
Our group, Tamarin, is solving this problem with Nectar, which ensures that data can be used without being revealed. It combines distributed file storage for continuous data availability and ownership, and privacy-preserving computation technology to remove intellectual property and security concerns. We can reduce the siloing of HIPAA-protected health data by allowing companies to share data legally and serve their intellectual property interests that would otherwise not be possible. Our ultimate goal is to be the infrastructure of modern health data, as well as acting as a DataOS for medicine, bioscience, and health apps.
Tech
The heart of Nectar is its Multi-Party Computation (MPC) system, which allows for statistical analysis and retrieval without any single party accessing underlying data. This will enable companies to retain their competitive intelligence and edge while being able to profit from the data. It also removes intra-company barriers, allowing full data access without revealing any private information that would be illegal to share between departments. Our platform encrypts and splits datasets into smaller chunks stored across multiple nodes so that even if a node were compromised, the encrypted chunks are useless. While other companies deidentify data before it is exchanged, Tamarin can run analyses on identified data, allowing for merged datasets, linking patients to trials, and using modern data analytic techniques. This allows for data sharing for drug development, patient care, and other improvements to the social good and health technology. We are currently finishing our MVP, with a launch date in October. We are planning to partner with Moonbeam and deploy our smart contracts there, and are excited about interacting with other parachains.
Potential:
The market opportunity for Tamarin, particularly in healthcare data security and privacy, is rapidly expanding. The addressable market encompasses healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, and bioscience research institutions that require secure data sharing and analysis capabilities. This market is driven by the increasing digitization of healthcare records, stringent data privacy requirements, and the growing need for secure data collaboration. Our final goal is to be a DataOS, a way to store, retrieve, protect, and permission health and bioscience data for all users, integrating fitness apps, hospitals, universities, and pharmaceutical companies. The data privacy market alone is currently worth over $2 billion, and Fortune predicts it will be worth over $30 billion in 2030.
Tamarin plans to employ a multi-channel distribution strategy to penetrate the market effectively. Initially, we will move through cold outreach and existing channels, which have seemed highly fruitful in generating interest. As we continue, standard B2B marketing strategies will be employed to gain new clients and grow our ecosystem.
Nectar by far outstrips other solutions available in the market. Current strategies on the market include creating AI-generated synthetic data, pre-joining data before it leaves walled gardens, and only doing analysis on smaller datasets. All of these have problems. Oftentimes, identities can not be protected when doing queries with small data, even with some synthetic data. Many uses of health data require the identification of patients, such as drug trial usage, etc. Our product can do all of these things.
We believe that claiming space in the trillion-dollar healthcare market can bring incredible value to the Polkadot ecosystem. As a National Science Foundation-backed, B2B DeSci project, we are able to elevate Moonbeam’s brand to an entirely new audience, and Moonbeam will be the first protocol to gain this level of exposure. We are coalescing advanced cryptography, multi-chain computing, and blockchain technologies for the world of health data, and through this grant, we will bring Moonbeam with us. We have no competitors in the web3-private compute-mediated space despite the fact that the market for medical data has been proven. In particular, Datavant https://www.datavant.com/ was recently valued at 7 billion, and Inovalon https://www.inovalon.com/ has a market cap of 6.37 billion. Both are web2 health data aggregation and analytics services, and we plan to disintermediate companies such as Datavant and Inovalon, allowing companies to directly connect to each other through our protocol. Our anticipated first clients include companies in the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical vertical and one of the nation’s largest health systems. Clients’ measurable blockchain transactions will include setting their data access and use policies, queuing of queries by data consumers, and query payments and refunds.
Management:
Our team is well-versed in the health data industry and building secure computing systems. Our CEO is Katherine Kuzmeskas, a 2x founder with 10+ years of experience in health data and infrastructure. Her status as a Yale EIR connects her to the network at Yale Ventures, which has many connections to the biopharmaceutical industry. We also have Riad S. Wahby. Ph.D., a professor at Carnegie Mellon with 10+ years of experience in designing and implementing secure computing environments; Brett Hemenway Falk, Ph.D., head of the “Crypto and Society” Lab at the University of Pennsylvania with over 10+ years of experience in cryptography; and Phil Chevalier, our lead programmer with proven distributed ledger engineering experience, including for Formula E (Formula 1 for electric cars).
Request for funds:
We are requesting funds for two reasons:
1)UX/UI development: Our go to market MVP is currently planned on being driven with command line arguments and a Python and R API. It would improve our user engagement and onboarding significantly to have a full, tested, easy to use GUI, which could be used by non-developer biostaticians, pathologists, and other members of the bioscientific community. This funding would improve the usability of our product, allowing scientists from many different disciplines to use our product.
- XCM integration: We intend to develop an XCM communication system to other parachains in order to compose and be composed upon by other protocols in the pokadot ecosystem. In particular, we are interested in connecting with:
Calamari: By leveraging Calamari’s privacy technology, we hope to mask data inputs and client queries on our system. Most of the inputs our system receives are some sort of sensitive data, either in terms of competitive advantage or health privacy.
KILT: KILT’s Zero-Knowledge (ZK) identity solution through Cross-Consensus Messaging (XCM) would provide a robust identity solution for both clients and, eventually, patients using our system. Creating an identity solution is a problem that we need to solve, and KILT’s solution looks robust and secure…
Heal3: Heal3 on Astar is potentially both a data provider and a potential customer for us.
Particle: Particle’s account abstraction solution fits well into our cross-chain solution, allowing our clients to have an easier, more seamless connection with our platform.
Please feel free to look at our deck for an overview of what we are doing!
We would love feedback from the community and are very interested in any comments or questions you have for us! We’ve noticed that there are less DeSci proposals then we would expect: we hope to change that! By being a composable part of the DeSci ecosystem,