Collaborative Drug Discovery with Blockchain Technology

Sammanfattning: The cost of developing and researching novel molecular compounds in the pharmaceutical industry is very high today. If an actor accidentally releases too much information about a novel molecule to the public the molecule becomes prior art, and as an effect, can not be patented. This has resulted in a fragmented space where collaboration across organizations is virtually non-existent. We propose a blockchain-based platform where participants can partially upload information of molecules while maintaining full ownership of the asset. This way novel molecules do not become prior art and gives the developer of the molecule the ability to reveal to the world that they have a molecule with a certain property, without actually revealing the molecule itself. Larger organizations could use this to auction out molecules that they are not interested in bringing to clinical trials or market, smaller organizations could use it to attract funding for a molecule that they have developed, and researchers could use it to timestamp that they knew the properties or a structure of a molecule at a certain date. A prototype is implemented using the blockchain technology Hyperledger Fabric and is analyzed from security and performance perspectives. Given the right circumstances, Fabric provides a set of functionalities that can be used to make sure that ownership is maintained, integrity is protected, and critical information remains confidential. From a performance perspective, Fabric provides a good throughput and latency in the order of milliseconds. However, the number of participants that can maintain the network seems to be limited in the prototype. These results should be seen as preliminary as no fine-grained optimization was conducted. Further work required to make the prototype production-ready and open problems are also discussed.