Building Trust in Science with AminoChain ft. CEO Caspar Barnes

GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today I'm ecstatic to welcome Caspar Barnes, who is the founder and CEO of AminoChain. If you didn't know, AminoChain is a community-owned infrastructure built to make research faster, more transparent, and more inclusive. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Caspar, learn all about AminoChain and the origin story around it.

All right, let's do this. GM GM. Welcome to the show, Caspar. I'm ecstatic to have you on today, man.

GM Narb, thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

My pleasure, my pleasure. I know you are a busy man and are joining us from a conference live, so I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to do that. Just for the audience today, if they aren't familiar with yourself, would you just like to give a brief introduction?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for having me, Narb. I'm super excited to speak with you today and share a little bit more about who we are and what we're building. We are currently at ASHG, American Society of Human Genetics, so a big conference with all sorts of different people in the bio-banking space, clinical genomics, and research. My name is Caspar, I'm the founder of the startup AminoChain. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa, hence the funny accent. I did my undergrad in the UK studying economics and neuroscience and moved to the US around four years ago.

I did a graduate degree in biotechnology and worked in cancer research for a while, then did another graduate degree in bioethics at Harvard Medical School and founded AminoChain around three years ago. Initially, when we set out to build AminoChain, we were focusing on building an NFT marketplace of donated stem cells. We were addressing the issue of not having enough allogenic stem cell donations for people with blood cancer. One way you can get cured of leukemia or lymphoma is through an allogenic stem cell transplantation. We need roughly 15,000 transplants every year for patients, and we're only achieving around 12,000. Around 3,000 people don't find a match and unfortunately pass away. The more we looked into it, it turns out there's a huge economy for donated stem cells. When people donate these, the nonprofits and registries are actually selling them for $40,000 per allogenic graft. These nonprofits are turning over half a billion in yearly revenue selling other people's donated body parts. That blew my mind. It makes no sense. Why is there this huge economy for donated material that somebody gives out of the kindness of their heart?

The more we dug into it, it turns out that consent rates are particularly low amongst marginalized communities and patients of color. If you're a white patient with blood cancer, you might have a 75% chance of finding a match. If you're African-American, you have around a 28% chance. It opened up this really interesting use case: there's an economy for donated body material, people are giving it for free and others are selling it, and the people hit hardest are the ones that don't have that trust in the system. So we decided to build a system to democratize this with crypto. We said, well, how about we just tokenize donated stem cell grafts, turn them into NFTs, list them on a decentralized marketplace, and then let researchers buy these NFTs? When they buy them, we pay royalties back to the patients that donated them and they can track where they go. That was the first thing that we built. That has now evolved through lots of iteration and speaking with biobanks into a general blockchain infrastructure to build healthcare applications. We are first focusing on connecting bio-repositories of all types of donated body parts. We have a different scalable architecture now, but effectively what started as a marketplace for donated stem cells is turning into a vision of building the Ethereum of healthcare.

Wow. That's amazing, man. That's quite an undertaking. For all the flak that crypto gets for scams and rug pulls, seeing blockchain technology used for actual, potentially life-changing purposes is phenomenal to see. I read in a blog article of yours that you guys are actually partnering with Syndicate for your blockchain infrastructure. Did you want to just get into that a little bit and the purpose behind that?

Yeah, exactly. As you can imagine with something like what we're building, a general-purpose blockchain for healthcare apps, there's a lot of real-world hurdles you have to overcome. A basic example would be working with bio-repositories or hospitals. If you want to sell them blockchain-based software, describing the tech stack and getting the HIPAA accreditations and explaining effectively how the whole software works in a provider agreement is incredibly complex. The first time we tried this with lawyers, they just said, 'Everything's going to be visible on a public blockchain, you take full responsibility for understanding tokenomics, validator nodes,' etc. The second we gave that to a hospital, they said, 'There's no way we're signing this.' We had to take a lot of time and effort into designing a really intricate protocol that bridges on-chain verifiability and trust but also allows for scalable off-chain computation and flexibility in where PII and PHI is stored so that you actually achieve your regulatory standards. After a lot of research, we've landed on a sophisticated design that bridges an app-chain infrastructure on Syndicate. We can control information that's publicly visible, control gas and token prices, and sequence transactions in a decentralized way while still leveraging the trust of crypto. We're excited to partner with Syndicate on that.

Wow. That's amazing to hear. There's always this weird friction with having this type of sensitive data publicly available on-chain. But I think data like this in particular makes sense to house on-chain and you guys seem to have crossed those hurdles. Going beyond stem cells that you mentioned as the initial version of AminoChain, what other kinds of scientific data are you guys planning on storing?

Absolutely. It's important to note that there's a very distinct economy for different types of bio-material. What we are focusing on right now is the world of what you call 'diseased tissue.' That means people that have some kind of disease, perhaps cancer, and they donate a biopsy sample as part of a routine part of surgery for research purposes, not for clinical purposes. Of those types of bio-repositories that store diseased tissue, we have roughly 2,500 in America. Across those 2,500, there's roughly 200 million samples stored. Across those 200 million available, we're only using around 10%. 90% of samples that are stored ready for research use are just lying dormant and people can't find them. Even if you do find them, there's long processes of trying to acquire them. So the first thing we set out to build with AminoChain was basically a search engine for these existing bio-samples. That gave us a foot in the door and a relationship with all these big provider networks. We've grown that out now to around a 30-biobank strong network across the United States, Europe, Africa, and so on.

That's wonderful to hear that so much data is now available for scientists and researchers to use. I guess having this much data available, are there any scientific breakthroughs or anything that have come from this that you can share, or maybe in the works? Caspar Barnes: Not yet, unfortunately. The platform was launched maybe five, six months ago now. But the network has grown quite strong. We've recently signed with some very large academic medical centers in the United States, like providers at Northwestern and Scripts and McGill University. Basically, now all these scientists can go and log on, look through their inventories and distribute their samples, but what exactly they're using them for we're not tracking this yet. Narb: Gotcha. But I mean, the ball is rolling. If you wanted to kind of share the platform itself, just kind of take us on a mini tour of what AminoChain looks like?

Yeah, I'd be happy to. So this is the Specimen Center. This is totally live. Anybody that wants to can go and log on and check all this stuff out. If you go to app.aminochain.io, this is what you see: a whole network of bio-repositories that we've integrated. You can click on the profile page of the biobank, see the high-level overview of collections they have, contact information—it's totally transparent. This is effectively like Facebook for biobanks. People can go and create their profile pages and for some of them, we've integrated into their inventory management systems, so we're pulling live updates about how they use their samples, what they have stored, and what's available.

And now, this is what the view looks like for filtering across all those collections. You can search by diagnostics, by specimen type, by donor information. Or, the most recent thing that we've just launched is natural language processing. So you could try search for something like 'breast cancer samples from women under 30 in the USA.' Then AI will ingest the query and will attach the relevant filters and return all of the results across the whole network of 30 biobanks. Here we go. You can see there's around 125 specimens that fit our need. You can see pathology information, preservation details. This is all de-identified, so these samples aren't necessarily linked back to the patient. But if we wanted to, we could add them to an inquiry and request the specimen directly from the biobank. What we're excited to do now is actually launch this as a protocol-integrated product, which means that this 29-year-old woman could have a patient interface and track how her samples and data are being used. When I buy this specimen on the marketplace, I can pay royalties back to her. She can earn dividends from the use of her specimen and we could query clinical data through zero-knowledge proofs. That is effectively where the blockchain comes in.

Amazing, amazing. It looks like you've built quite a bit in just a few months there. Since we are a developer-oriented show, are there any plans to expose this data via an API or something like that in the future?

Yes, absolutely. People want retrospective samples, but they don't buy samples to look at them because they're beautiful; they want to turn them into datasets. People want proteomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics. So that's what we're moving into now. Instead of just looking through existing bio-specimen collections, we will actually start to aggregate multi-omic datasets on the same people and then have this economy where they can earn incentives and share in the benefits. Theoretically, yes, if it's a decentralized protocol, anybody should be able to source that data and build a target discovery platform or use it in a way that's decentralized. We would just be the permissionless infrastructure layer to let people do that. That is of course our ambition. Practically what that looks like in a stepwise action is a question we're still answering, but the vision is to be that composable layer that has the relationships with medical providers so that others can go and build dApps on it.

Definitely, sounds like there is quite a bit to still shuffle through, but you guys have built quite the foundation already. Is any of this open source by chance for people who are interested in helping build out this vision? Or are you guys hiring?

Yeah, absolutely. We're certainly hiring. We are deep in protocol development, designing something that will be progressively more and more decentralized. Eventually, it will be open source so people can build on it. In the meantime, the interface and the system are open for anyone to go and use the data. We're always on the lookout for top talent that wants to come help and join our mission in building trust in science and healthcare. The next thing on our agenda is focus on bridging equity and agency back to research participants. We will have kitting infrastructure set up and we will send these little kits to people's homes. There will be a small capillary blood collection device in it. People can collect blood, scan the kit ID with our donor app, and send it back to the biobank. When researchers buy that stuff, patients earn 'points' they can exchange for incentives like Uber credits or flight miles. The two main indications we're focusing on now will be psoriasis and myasthenia gravis.

Beautiful. If you're someone watching today and that fits your criteria, definitely reach out to Caspar. To end things off on a general note, I was curious to get your thoughts on the DeSci space in general, where you think it's at, and where you think it's going in five or ten years?

Yeah, in other words, 'when token?' (laughs). No, it's a great question. A lot of the DeSci narrative today is inextricably linked with whatever crypto asset people are trying to launch. I think if you're an early developer in a crypto-enabled product, if you launch a token before you have product-market fit, then you seriously risk losing credibility in what you're building. You need to design what you're doing carefully and get users set up even using stablecoins if you have to. Our ambition with AminoChain is to be that composable layer for institutional healthcare. I think DeSci in general right now is suffering from a little bit too much of a 'crypto-first' narrative as opposed to an 'innovation-first' narrative. We'll get there at some point. In a hundred years, I think medical records will be decentralized and problems will be addressed, but there will be many failed attempts in the meantime because they approach it the wrong way. We're trying to be very deliberate and hopefully, it will be a win for everybody.

Great answer. Caspar, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us today. It was a pleasure having you on and really looking forward to seeing how AminoChain evolves. All right, all. With that, just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be, and we'll catch you back here for another great episode of DevNTell next week. Until then, have a good one, folks. Bye!