KP's Mattison: 'Blockchain will revolutionize research'

BOSTON—“Blockchain is going to be the most disruptive technology in this space aside from data analytics,” predicted John Mattison, MD, chief medical information officer and assistant medical director for Kaiser Permanente, speaking at Bio-IT World Congress.

Mattison’s talk covered the current state of data analytics, including Precision Medicine.

He noted the big bang theory, or the accelerated expansion of the universe, and said data is doing the exact inverse of that. Meiosis is the ultimate innovation engine, he said, where maternal and paternal traits are mashed up. “That has a huge influence on how we think about what we’re going to do with big data.”

Mattison also compared the current landscape of data analytics to a tropical rainforest—a setting that has both the richest and poorest soil and the most optimized capture of sunlight of any ecosystem. The human equivalent in era of plecosystem—multiplatform ecosystem—is a meta-tropical brainforest, he said. “We have to bring together different people to really understand the data. If you don’t curate data with human domain experts, you can be chasing your tail with a lot of noise and not understanding the distinction between correlation and causation.”

The microbiome is something else he has devoted time and energy to because “it is equally impactful as human genome sequencing is if not more so.” Studies have shown that early antibiotic exposure at birth can be tied to neurological problems during the teenage years, he noted. The microbiome, genome, neuroma and more are intimately connected.

“There is no such thing as common disease," said Mattison. "Over 200 diseases of the gut alone have their own unique microbiome.”

The term Mattison coined, plecosystem, has the following principles: exponential growth, synergy and convergence, data liquidity, person-centricity, open source communities and accelerated innovation through interoperability by design.

Mattison cited several recent references to blockchain technology, including CIO magazine, which advocated for dropping whatever you’re doing to adopt blockchain. Microsoft is providing blockchain as a service, and a banking consortium is going to be using blockchain for faster, more secure and more transparent transactions. “Everyone has built or is building a blockchain team.”

A blockchain for securing and representing genomes is just one of hundreds of use cases, he said. This secure, distributed ledger tool can help track annotation of alleles. Counterfeiting is increasingly rampant and blockchain is a natural fit. "The provenance management blockchain you know that when you buy a drug, bolt or car component, you know exactly where it came from and there is no chance that a counterfeit is inserted in the chain of custody."

The question of who owns a medical record has been much debated but blockchain “promises to give individual citizens worldwide the right to contain, maintain and manage the who, what, how, when and where of their medical record. I believe blockchain will revolutionize how research is conducted.”

That’s because one problem with the Precision Medicine initiative and similar projects is getting people to volunteer because they are pretty wary. “The issue is that we don’t have a good incentive structure for why people should donate their data to science.” But, blockchain can help with microattribution and micro-crediting, Mattison said. “The more people that have access to their genome, the more relevant research will be available to them.”

He imagines a scenario in which data donaters receive a weekly email listing how their data is being used. For example, a note telling a person that a study used his or her allele to advance science and therapy of breast cancer, as well as an explanation of how many people were treated appropriately because of that information. “Doing that at scale matters," said Mattison. "There are more viable permutations of human genome than there are humans who have ever walked the earth. There is no such thing as a cohort large enough to really accelerate the discovery process.”

Looking ahead, Mattison said there is an opportunity in his field to either exaggerate social disparities or reduce them. “As we pursue our careers in the biotech space, we need to be mindful of the fact that a rising tide does not always raise all ships.”