Importance of an Open Marketplace to Drive Healthcare Improvements

The rise of the precision medicine era made it clear that R&D is all about interconnectivity and data sharing. Data sharing ensures that precision medicine is brought to patients and healthy individuals faster, cheaper, and with significantly less severe adverse effects, leveraging information from the interaction between labs, biobanks, business management, Clinical Research Organizations (CROs), investigators, patients and a variety of other stakeholders. However, nowadays data sharing is often hindered, particularly in countries where health data is centrally managed and controlled by governments.

Moving genomics data and associated health information into routine healthcare management will be critical for integrating precision medicine into health systems. The Shivom genomics ecosystem can promote participants long-term investment in their own health and commitment to medical research. By contributing their data to a global genomics database, individuals enable various research studies, either by donating temporarily the data to academic institutions or selling access to the data to organizations for drug discovery, among other use-cases.

A number of initiatives across the globe aim to improve access to precision medicine personal health by providing health apps based on genomic and other health data, attempting to tackle the same problems from different angles, often unwittingly directly or indirectly in competition with one another. This stifles research and innovation and prevents medicine and healthcare in moving forward at the pace that it should.

Our aim is not to compete with existing efforts, but to provide an open marketplace for new ideas and applications that enhance the wellbeing of our members. Shivom’s vision is to become the number one genomic and healthcare data hub on the planet. To do so, it will require open collaboration, networking and partnerships rather than direct competition with existing third parties. This is why a lot of our time and efforts are spent on generating new partnerships that will allow us to expand our future service offerings and increase the value to both our donors and customers.

Potential areas of services in this marketplace include among others, health apps, nutritional and fitness advice, ancestry information, treatment plans, genealogy, disease predisposition, high throughput data analytics, pharmacogenomics, and lifestyle management. For example, a company that provides nutritional advice based on the genome data of their customers can consider joining our marketplace to offer the same service to all members of the Shivom network. Other examples of apps may relate to taste perception, drug metabolism, caffeine or alcohol tolerance, behavior, physical appearance, and many more.

Applications and services built on top of our marketplace will form an important part of the genomics ecosystem. Our partners may already have, or want to develop their own apps. Looking into the future, with new scientific discoveries, additional apps and services will be added as the community grows and attracts more projects to its orbit. Looking to the future as more personalized biological information becomes available, we aim to offer services that are based not only on genomic data, but also other ‘omics’ information. When combining genomic data with other molecular data, such as epigenomic, metabolomic, transcriptomic, microbiome data, and clinical information, the resulting uniquely rich dataset enables integrative analyses to be carried out at unprecedented depth and scale and facilitates new insights into molecular disease processes. Integrating data from different technologies is a rare case where 1+1 equals more than 2; the more data is combined, the more useful it is for research, and the more valuable the scientific insights. Linkage of multiple data sets at the individual level will allow for Big Data to be truly transformative.

By implementing on open, collaborative web marketplace will allow Shivom to reach grand scale faster, utilizing the magnifying power of network effects. Our aim is to build a large community, and to get people engaged across the globe. By using the latest technologies, we plan to make this ecosystem highly user friendly and convenient such that anybody will be able to use it. By utilizing blockchain technology and next-generation cryptography, we will build trust around the ecosystem, shattering consumer hesitations about personal data storage online and in the hands of corporations. By being user-centric, Shivom is focusing on the rights of the user/donor and the customers that use this data for health care initiatives. [Join the Shivom vision by signing up for our alpha trial!]

— By Dr.Axel Schumacher(CEO of Project SHIVOM)
 — Dr.Natalie Pankova(CSO of Project SHIVOM)