This is another project aimed at humanitarian goals for public health. The project conducts research following a test method and allows any contractual partner to have a clinical investigation to enter data generated by their test. In this way, the project can own many people's intellectual property. I believe that successful projects will be of great significance to public health.
There are several good reasons to have clinical data on the blockchain.
•Immutability. Scientific data need to be immutable. Once a study is peer reviewed and published, its data must be permanently stored and never altered. In the blockchain, all data is stored in every single node, never ceasing to exist, and always staying on the blockchain. It is immutability that gives the blockchain its openness and BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance).
•Decentralization. The blockchain is designed to be distributed and synchronized across networks, making data freely available to anyone. We believe that scientific data should be shared and not being hidden behind a firewall.
•Security. The kind of transactions that can be performed are strictly defined in advance and stored in the blockchain as “smart contracts”; this prevents fraudulent data from being added to the blockchain thus ensuring integrity of the database. By contrast, it would be much easier to compromise a centralized database.
In conclusion, although it is true that such an application could be implemented with a centralized system, decentralization is the only way to ensure the data is not manipulated, and all information is pubblicly available in a platform that can't be influenced by the will of any particular entity or government. Decentralization is essential to hand over administrative authority from central institutions managing the data, such as governments and private entities, to the collectivity. In fact, if the database is controlled by one single entity, being it a private entity or government, it means that such entity has total control over the database, and such control can be influenced by personal conflicts of interests. Therefore, decentralization is the only way to ensure that scientific data become public property. In addition, in terms of costs, creating an infrastructure ensuring the same level of data integrity protection of a smart contract deployed on the Etherum blockchain, which is basically impossible to compromise, and most importantly, maintaining such a platform up and running, would simply not be feasible.