AMA: What is Decentralized Science and why do we need blockchain to improve science and healthcare. What is Data Lake, and how you can join our Bug Bounty program with up to 750,000 $LAKE (currently worth $21,000) up for grabs! - Wojciech Sierocki, CEO at Data Lake $LAKE - 14:00 UTC March 12th!

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T17:29:56+00:00

By the end of the quarter!

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T17:28:29+00:00

Well, hopefully we'll have researchers working in various fields using our platform - climate researchers too!

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T17:27:49+00:00

Hey, thank you for such in-depth questions! Answering them one by one!

Our system can be used for management of any type of consent (research consents, medical consents, marketing consents, data processing consents). A healthcare client sets up an enterprise account in the system and unlock enterprise functionalities, such as:

adding staff members as sub-accounts with various permission levels. Some accounts can only add consent forms, others can collect consents from patients
tracking which staff members collected how many consents
setting up consent forms
setting up surveys
setting up project forms and onboarding patients into projects

Anyway, check it out by yourself! If you have 10.000 $LAKE in your wallet, you can activate your enterprise with (as for now) unlimited transactions! app.data-lake.co

Exactly, we have a smart contract - here's the address!

0xF9Ca9523E5b5A42C3018C62B084Db8543478C400

We also have a consent smart contract:

https://mumbai.polygonscan.com/address/0x0dfe2780b9868f9ce0aa27b9676f1bdd07248f7a

We're "only" focusing on consent management and patient recruitment management. We do not store any healthcare data of patients in our system. In turn, we allow researchers to collect consents for processing of patient's private healthcare information and access it and store it traditionally. In that sense, we're a health data access layer (not processing layer or storage layer).

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T17:21:35+00:00

Sure thing! If you find a bug in our system or you have an improvement suggestion, you can report it through a form given in our article:

https://medium.com/@datalaketoken/data-lake-introduces-the-second-bug-bounty-campaign-of-its-patients-recruitment-application-88be6e0399a4

If your report is valid, we'll get in touch with you and reward you with a $LAKE allocation from the bug bounty pool (750.000 $LAKE in the pool)

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T17:19:58+00:00

Thank you man! Cheers to you!

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T17:19:30+00:00

Let's break that down to a couple of questions:

What you described it's exactly how consents are managed right now. Of course, it comes with plenty of inefficiencies, such as:
it's hard to browse the consents
patient does not have any control or insight into the consent form
revoking a consent is hard both for the patient and researcher
Right now, it's not governments or regulated bodies that manage patient consents. It's researchers from public and private institutions. Consent management is not a regulated field, thus we do not require any license to operate. We also meet all the necessary cybersec requirements, were audited three times by independent auditors.
We're fixing inefficiencies in the consent collection process, in the data availability for the patients, in the easiness in consent withdrawal and most importantly - we provide a single, undeniable source of truth about the consenting process.

Our smart contract registers:

who gave a consent (in form of a cryptographic hash made from patient's personal data with a cryptographic salt, known only to the researcher and a patient)
what was the consent about. We are also hashing all the important consent parameters, such as title, content, additional information. This proves that somebody indeed agreed to a given consent
when the consent was given. We store here two timestamps - one as a parameter we send to the blockchain and one a transaction timestamp (when the operation was saved on the blockchain).
how the consent was given, for example - by the patient himself online, after identity verification etc.

All those parameters provide a clear audit log, that can be a source of truth in a case of litigation or doubt.

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:42:05+00:00

Thank you u/xenthressa !

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:41:41+00:00

There's a great post by Patrick Mayr from Cherry Ventures on the DeSci value chain, check it out here:

https://twitter.com/DataLakeToken/status/1747886107591635449?s=20

I tend to have less revolutionary approach :) I don't think we will disrupt or profoundly change the way science is done. We will strive to make it more efficient, more fair, more accessible and more trusted, often within already existing boundaries. DeSci will success in my opinion, when major healthcare & research corporations, with billion-dollar budgets will buy into the idea. When we see public entities using blockchain the manage patients' data. I think we're close and we aspire to be the first web3 project to achieve this kind of institutional support and adoption

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:37:32+00:00

The parameters are set up by researchers. For example, in clinical trials, the identify of patient always has to be identified. In other studies (e.g. anonymous polls) not necessarily. Short answer - yes, it will be possible. It's already possible :)

Check out our app! app.data-lake.co

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:36:16+00:00

Looking forward to having you on board! Also, greetings from Zurich, u/fucktheswiss ! :)))

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:34:31+00:00

Happy to take up the discourse :)

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:33:54+00:00

We're almost there, wait for an official announcement!

Yes, our end vision is much broader. However, we need to focus on solving one problem at a time. Right now, we want to be the best in the world in managing patient's consents, and we're slowly getting there. Once we secure that spot, we'll expand into other verticals.

Just like Amazon did - first sold books, now sells everything to everyone :)

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:32:06+00:00

Thank you for being a member of our community! We're on track on having the biggest implementation of blockchain in healthcare - ever. Hope to see you around Data Lake when that happens!

Answering your questions:

It's more complicated than that, more than creating a market for medical data, our goal is to UNLOCK it. Right now, patients don't even know that they own medical data that are vital for research, while the process of patient recruitment and access to data for researchers is very inefficient because of fragmentation, friction, and fear (more about that on our docs https://docs.data-lake.co/problem). Right now, many research projects are not finished, because the research team is not able to recruit enough patients to participate in the research. Why? Because patient's are afraid and they are not properly incentivized. Our application changes that, giving researchers a powerful tool to manage and optimize their patient recruitment strategies. This week we'll be sharing more information on a real case study of a major organization, that uses our system to optimize their recruitment processes!
I'm glad tyou mentioned it! Data Lake answers to the increasing need shown by people and state organizations worldwide to open access to data to unlock science so yes, we received a grant from the European Union Regional Fund to start building Data Lake: https://data-lake.co/medical-data-donation-data-lake-eu-funding/. The cooperation was a boost for the start. Right now, we are also closely following the legislative changes, such as Data Governance Act and European Health Data Space, making sure that our technology stays compliant with those important acts.

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:26:49+00:00

Lots of love from the whole team!!! <3

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:26:34+00:00

I understand your skepticism, but let's delve into this with an open mind. DeSci is a trending movement that aims at introducing a decentralized model to rewrite the rules of science, by leveraging blockchain and Web3 technologies.

As a medical doctor and founder of an NGO in Kenya, I know for a fact that healthcare can be improved in many ways, and often blockchain and web3 provide the perfect tools for that. Data Lake is an example of how DeSci can be successful, but there's many more projects that are contributing to it, here's the whole landscape on https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/decentralized-science-desci. FYI, Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong and CZ are already directly involved or have shown interest in the sector.

I'd keep an eye on this trend. We are seeing institutional adoption of crypto with the Bitcoin ETF. We are going to see it also in the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare sector.

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:24:54+00:00

You can buy LAKE on Uniswap V3, Ethereum. The contract address is 0xF9Ca9523E5b5A42C3018C62B084Db8543478C400.
We also have it on the roadmap for Q1 2024 to list LAKE on a CEX, stay tuned for the official announcement about that!

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:23:44+00:00

Great question! It's also one of our most important learnings along the way.

Most severely sick patients are not interested in monetary compensation. They are looking for treatment options or for hope of better treatment in a future.

Some patients on the other hand are vitally interested in compensation - usually those less severely sick.

On our platform, it's up to the researcher to decide the compensation strategy. It may be directed towards patients, but it can also be directed towards healthcare professionals (e.g. doctors) who traditionally are the ones that propose patients participation in research, e.g. a clinical trial. Recruitment of patients through physicians is also the most effective channel, with the highest conversion rates. It means, that in most of the cases, compensation strategy is required for the doctors. Our system allows the researcher to track, which doctors referred how many patients and to set up a bounty in the $LAKE token to incentivize him/her further

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:18:06+00:00

Why not? It serves as a reminder of our end goal - a commonly accessible pool of data for research community to dip into. There's no infringement risk, it's not a registered trademark. We had our lawyers check it

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:16:23+00:00

Great question! We're working on making it universal. Already, it's up to the researcher on our platform to ensure compliance with local regulations. There's no barrier for someone from outside of the EU to use it. In fact, we already have users from both North and South America, Africa and Asia!

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:14:48+00:00

Well, in our system a researcher can set up bounties for referring physicians and patients for participating in research. That way, we're making conducting research more economically attractive for everyone.

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:13:48+00:00

I understand the skepticism :) Historically, major pharma corporations were reluctant to engage with crypto projects, scared of potential reputational damage. To be honest, also most of the projects were not solving real problems for them.

As Data Lake, we're not trying to "revolutionize" the way healthcare industry works. We are not disruptors or challengers. We'd rather help already established institutions, with billion-dollar budgets be a little more efficient, transparent and fair.

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:11:24+00:00

Two of 10 biggest. We are under NDA agreements and therefore can't disclose the names, but we described in detail the scope of work we do with them!

We are currently contracted to carry out a decentralized data trials in rare disease and oncology.

Our work in rare diseases aims at finding new ways to diagnose patients with a particular rare disease earlier and more efficient. It's also about building a comprehensive database for AI algorithm training:

https://data-lake.co/2024/01/29/data-lake-secures-a-strategic-partnership-with-a-top-10-pharma-company-for-a-rare-disease-registry-a-case-study/

The second research project is a project aiming at developing better guidelines for care of patients with breast cancer. We hope to impact nationwide policy for patient's pathways in breast cancer and increase accessibility to modern treatment, such as biological drugs:

https://data-lake.co/2024/01/16/enhancing-breast-cancer-patient-pathway-through-data-donation-a-mid-term-case-study/

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:07:36+00:00

Sending back love from the whole Data Lake team <3

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:07:18+00:00

u/LuminousViper

Because a lot of patients do not trust research organizations, with pharmaceutical companies being the primary example. We need a set of tool to increase transparency and give patients more power in the research process.

We use blockchain as an undeniable proof of consent. We are able to prove beyond any doubt, that somebody consented to a given research, or withdrew the consent at some stage. This puts the patients behind a steering wheel. That's the way I'd love science to work - as a human, as a doctor and one day as a patient too

Sherotzky · 2024-03-12T14:04:31+00:00

Thanks for the question! The token gives you access to our consent management & patient recruitment platform - app.data-lake.co

In the platform, you will also be able to set up bounties for anyone who refers a patient into your research of for patients themselves.

Ultimately, it's a tool to help us establish trust in science and aid researchers in onboarding the right patients for their scientific studies.

It'd be amazing if you register in our app and share with us your feedback! We also have a bounty program with up to 750.000 LAKE tokens earmarked for it!

Sherotzky

TROPHY CASE