Blockchain for Health Data Sharing Systems to Accelerate Precision Medicine and Therapeutic Development

  • 4,597

    Total downloads

  • 31k

    Total views and downloads

About this Research Topic

Submission closed

Background

Global healthcare’s most pressing concern is the simultaneous increase in the complexity of disease and the rising costs of healthcare services and pharmaceutical drug development. Together these exacerbate the already burdened systems facing heavy tension. We can see the ripples of this tension in times of crisis when immediate and urgent needs for effective healthcare delivery arise.

Concurrently, there’s a drive towards effective targeted medicine. This involves directed approaches for specific patient subgroups to reduce adverse events and costs, and to improve patient well-being sooner and more effectively. This type of disease management requires the incorporation of numerous genetic associations, and various epigenetic and environmental factors such as diet, exercise, smoking habits, in addition to other lifestyle factors. Such a vast range of relevant information makes it challenging to understand the direct mechanisms of disease. This is further complicated by heterogeneous patient populations where individuals present with various degrees of pathology, making it difficult to model these diseases adequately in preclinical settings to enable effective and rapid drug discovery.

Together this leads to a greater need to be able to effectively collect and assimilate data from patients and across systems to enable relevant and focused analysis and outcomes measurement. However, existing data sources are often untapped, inaccessible, or siloed, and therefore not amenable to assimilation into larger datasets. Many processes are either inadequate or lacking to be able to do this effectively. These include clinical trial data, genomic datasets, health records, and patient-generated data, all of which can be used to derive biomarkers of disease and treatment targets. Moreover, newly gathered data is slow to assimilate with existing sources to make effective connecting links and there is little existing inter-organizational collaboration for data sharing; yet all this can aid in more rapid clinical decision making, diagnostics, and drug discovery and development.

There’s much scope for improvement in effectively combining datasets, cleaning up data, and extracting information that is of value to health systems stakeholders and pharmaceutical companies. Blockchain and distributed ledgers are technological tools that can be leveraged to better collect, manage, share, and disseminate healthcare data, for example via secure and trusted information highways. This can enable the unlocking of data siloes, increasing interoperability and rapid collaboration when and where they are needed most, as well as delivering novel insights to provide effective solutions to be fed back into healthcare systems, industry, and ultimately patients.

The focus of this Research Topic is on the implementation of blockchain in precision medicine ecosystems to describe how pharma, diagnostics companies, clinical systems, and patients can benefit from solutions that can efficiently deliver more relevant and targeted healthcare. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Data and information highways
• Patient data sharing systems
• Institutional data sharing systems
• Open data systems and platforms
• Trusted data systems and platforms
• Enabling analytics pipelines assembly
• Federated learning systems
• Clinical trials
• Healthcare delivery optimization
• Self-sovereign patient records
• Pharmaceutical discovery
• Drug development systems and processes
• Regulatory, ethical and information governance considerations
• COVID-19 response and learnings

----
Disclaimers:
- Topic Editor Natalie Pankova is employed at Metadvice, a digital health company that is developing clinical decision support applications with technologies including distributed ledger. She is also an Advisor for Blockchain Reply and sits on the Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies committee at the British Standards Institute.
- Topic Editor Jonathan Passerat-Palmbach is employed by the company ConsenSysHealth, which focuses on privacy-preserving machine learning and decentralization.
- Topic Editor Mirko De Malde is CEO of Tharisis, a consultancy company focusing on digital transformation with a focus on healthcare.

Keywords: Blockchain, distributed, artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital health, medical technology, internet of things, medical device, pharmaceutical, electronic health records, hospital, telemedicine, clinical trials, pandemic, coronavirus, covid, data sharing, trust, ethics, policy

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

Topic editors

Frequently asked questions

  • Frontiers' Research Topics are collaborative hubs built around an emerging theme.Defined, managed, and led by renowned researchers, they bring communities together around a shared area of interest to stimulate collaboration and innovation.

    Unlike section journals, which serve established specialty communities, Research Topics are pioneer hubs, responding to the evolving scientific landscape and catering to new communities.

  • The goal of Frontiers' publishing program is to empower research communities to actively steer the course of scientific publishing. Our program was implemented as a three-part unit with fixed field journals, flexible specialty sections, and dynamically emerging Research Topics, connecting communities of different sizes and maturity.

    Research Topics originate from the scientific community. Many of our Research Topics are suggested by existing editorial board members who have identified critical challenges or areas of interest in their field.

  • As an editor, Research Topics will help you build your journal, as well as your community, around emerging, cutting-edge research. As research trailblazers, Research Topics attract high-quality submissions from leading experts all over the world.

    A thriving Research Topic can potentially evolve into a new specialty section if there is sustained interest and a growing community around it.

  • Each Research Topic must be approved by the specialty chief editor, and it falls under the editorial oversight of our editorial boards, supported by our in-house research integrity team. The same standards and rigorous peer review processes apply to articles published as part of a Research Topic as for any other article we publish.

    In 2023, 80% of the Research Topics we published were edited or co-edited by our editorial board members, who are already familiar with their journal's scope, ethos, and publishing model. All other topics are guest edited by leaders in their field, each vetted and formally approved by the specialty chief editor.

  • Publishing your article within a Research Topic with other related articles increases its discoverability and visibility, which can lead to more views, downloads, and citations. Research Topics grow dynamically as more published articles are added, causing frequent revisiting, and further visibility.

    As Research Topics are multidisciplinary, they are cross-listed in several fields and section journals – increasing your reach even more and giving you the chance to expand your network and collaborate with researchers in different fields, all focusing on expanding knowledge around the same important topic.

    Our larger Research Topics are also converted into ebooks and receive social media promotion from our digital marketing team.

     

  • Frontiers offers multiple article types, but it will depend on the field and section journals in which the Research Topic will be featured. The available article types for a Research Topic will appear in the drop-down menu during the submission process.

    Check available article types here 

  • Yes, we would love to hear your ideas for a topic. Most of our Research Topics are community-led and suggested by researchers in the field. Our in-house editorial team will contact you to talk about your idea and whether you’d like to edit the topic. If you’re an early-stage researcher, we will offer you the opportunity to coordinate your topic, with the support of a senior researcher as the topic editor. 

    Suggest your topic here 

  • A team of guest editors (called topic editors) lead their Research Topic. This editorial team oversees the entire process, from the initial topic proposal to calls for participation, the peer review, and final publications.

    The team may also include topic coordinators, who help the topic editors send calls for participation, liaise with topic editors on abstracts, and support contributing authors. In some cases, they can also be assigned as reviewers.

  • As a topic editor (TE), you will take the lead on all editorial decisions for the Research Topic, starting with defining its scope. This allows you to curate research around a topic that interests you, bring together different perspectives from leading researchers across different fields and shape the future of your field. 

     

    You will choose your team of co-editors, curate a list of potential authors, send calls for participation and oversee the peer review process, accepting or recommending rejection for each manuscript submitted.

  • As a topic editor, you're supported at every stage by our in-house team. You will be assigned a single point of contact to help you on both editorial and technical matters. Your topic is managed through our user-friendly online platform, and the peer review process is supported by our industry-first AI review assistant (AIRA).

  • If you’re an early-stage researcher, we will offer you the opportunity to coordinate your topic, with the support of a senior researcher as the topic editor. This provides you with valuable editorial experience, improving your ability to critically evaluate research articles and enhancing your understanding of the quality standards and requirements for scientific publishing, as well as the opportunity to discover new research in your field, and expand your professional network.

  • Yes, certificates can be issued on request. We are happy to provide a certificate for your contribution to editing a successful Research Topic.

  • Research Topics thrive on collaboration and their multi-disciplinary approach around emerging, cutting-edge themes, attract leading researchers from all over the world.

  • As a topic editor, you can set the timeline for your Research Topic, and we will work with you at your pace. Typically, Research Topics are online and open for submissions within a few weeks and remain open for participation for 6 – 12 months. Individual articles within a Research Topic are published as soon as they are ready.

    Find out more about our Research Topics

  • Our fee support program ensures that all articles that pass peer review, including those published in Research Topics, can benefit from open access – regardless of the author's field or funding situation.

    Authors and institutions with insufficient funding can apply for a discount on their publishing fees. A fee support application form is available on our website.

  • In line with our mission to promote healthy lives on a healthy planet, we do not provide printed materials. All our articles and ebooks are available under a CC-BY license, so you can share and print copies.

     

Impact

  • 31kTopic views
  • 24kArticle views
  • 4,597Article downloads
View impact