'We need to fix this'

Caspar Barnes was 12 years old when he developed a malignant melanoma, an aggressive type of skin cancer. He was lucky – the cancer was caught early – and Barnes remembers waking up from surgery with the doctor standing over his bed holding a biopsy sample. “He was like: ‘Check it out. This is what we cut out of your lower back’. And I was like: ‘Cool, can I take it home? I want to show my friends at school!’” Instead, the doctor explained they needed to keep the sample and study it. Barnes was too young to really understand the ethics of what was going on, but his mum signed a consent form and the biosample was handed over, never to be seen again.

Being thrust into the world of healthcare from a young age led Barnes, who is from South Africa, to pursue a career in life sciences. Years later, while studying a graduate degree at Columbia, he found himself thinking back to the situation with the biopsy sample. He was conducting research on donated cancer tissue and realised he had no way to tell the patient about what they were learning. When he asked his Principal Investigator if they had a way to share this information, he was told: “I don’t know who that sample belongs to – it just came from the biobank”. It “blew my mind”, says Barnes, who was struck that there was such a disconnect between pre-clinical research and the people who were providing the samples. In his eyes it was an interdisciplinary issue that touched on issues of trust, consent and how to go about procuring biosamples in the first place. “I was like, this is crazy,” he says, “We need to fix this”. The answer, it turned out, lay in crypto. 

Building a blockchain protocol

In late 2022 Barnes founded AminoChain, a health-tech startup that uses blockchain technology to track and encode biosamples in order to create a decentralised marketplace for the sector.  “If you turn biosamples into NFTs, then they're trackable,” he says. “On this blockchain protocol, you can build any number of applications…and of course, you can program rules into these digital assets that let the patients track where their samples go.” Today, the company has a team of 14, has raised $7.8m in funding and is working with a network of 22 biobanks. The company is currently tracking the data of roughly 350,000,000 biospecimens, from over 100,000 patients, and serving around 100 researchers across large pharma companies, the national institute of health, and universities.

While Barnes had a host of academic credentials (a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences (BA & BSc majoring in economics and neuroscience from UCL and graduate degrees from Columbia and Harvard) he was seeking collaborators with a computer science background. Joining Antler in New York was a natural opportunity to make these connections. While there, he also attended a hackathon and was able to put together a team of engineers that could build a prototype. Crucially, Antler helped him hone the focus of the startup. “Looking back to what we were doing in 2022, it was ridiculous…it made no sense. We were trying to boil the ocean, being overly quixotic and were never going to get to anything conducive. And amidst all that, Antler somehow managed to have faith in us.”

The first application for AminoChain was a biosample marketplace called the specimen centre, which pulls together the inventory of biobanks to make it easier for researchers to rapidly locate and licence biosamples. As Barnes explains, there's around 2,500 biobanks in America with around 200 million biosamples stored across all of them. “And 90% of all of those biospecimens aren't being used in research because people can't find them.” 

Guerilla outreach

Getting biobanks to engage was, at first, a challenge. “I ended up just walking into hospitals and saying, ‘where's your phlebotomy lab?’ and then finding the phlebotomist and saying ‘where's your biobank’?” says Barnes, describing his “guerilla outreach” strategy. Then, at a biosample conference in Seattle, he finally persuaded his first biobank to do a pilot run. “We increased their biosample distribution by three times over three months,” says Barnes. “And they loved it.” Suddenly interest began to build, with AminoChain’s Silicon Valley approach impressing an industry that had been lagging behind on tech. “There's no dedicated software for biobanking in general,” says Barnes.

AminoChain brings together a team with a background in blockchain, bioethics and lifesciences. Many have PhDs in their field, or have previously worked in pharma; one team member was previously the chief revenue officer at one of the largest biosample marketplaces and took the company public. This combines with the energy of Barnes, who is 27, and his co-founder, Max Matthews, a self-taught engineer he met at the hackathon in New York. “He didn't even go to university,” says Barnes. This mix of young and hungry with those with knowledge and wisdom has been special, says Barnes: “I think that's something that we've been really lucky with.” 

Now that AminoChain has aggregated a large network of biobanks, Barnes is looking to the future. The focus has been building trust with its users, but now they are at the “really exciting part” where they can start integrating blockchain enabled features into the platform people are currently using. “That's top of the mind right now,” he says. “How do we bridge the crypto with the biotech?”

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