On the Use of Blockchain Technology to Improve the Reproducibility of Preclinical Research Experiments

Eduardo Oliveira, Rafael Z. Frantz, Carlos Molina-Jiménez, Thiago Heck, Sandro Sawicki, Fabricia Roos-Frantz

2023

Abstract

Preclinical research is crucial for the advancement of life sciences. The use of experimental animal models in basic health sciences historically helped humanity to understand the pathological mechanisms of diseases and to develop therapeutic strategies, medicines and vaccines. Progress in this direction depends, to a large degree, on experimentation. Therefore, it is highly desirable that research experiments conducted on preclinical research are reproducible. Regrettably, a large number of experiments are not reproducible. Factors leading to irreproducible research on preclinical studies fall into four major categories: Biological reagents and reference materials, study design, data analysis and reporting and laboratory protocols. The data analysis and reporting category concentrates 25.5% of the total factors. Is estimated that $7.19 billions of the total research budget is funding irreproducible experiments. It is widely acknowledged that sharing experimental data between different institutions and cooperative researchers worldwide helps in experiment reproducibility which results in science and technology acceleration and innovation. Data sharing involves several data operations: The researcher needs to collect the data, protect it to prevent accidental and malicious deletion and corruption and make it available to colleagues, possibly, to the general public. The execution of these operations is cumbersome and error prone unless appropriate technology is used. This paper suggests and explores the use of blockchain to improve the reproducibility of experiments.A blockchain is a decentralised database that offers several properties that can be used advantageously in the collection, storage and sharing of experimental data, for instance, it prevents deletion.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Oliveira E., Z. Frantz R., Molina-Jiménez C., Heck T., Sawicki S. and Roos-Frantz F. (2023). On the Use of Blockchain Technology to Improve the Reproducibility of Preclinical Research Experiments. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 1: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-758-648-4, SciTePress, pages 173-179. DOI: 10.5220/0011851700003467

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis23,
author={Eduardo Oliveira and Rafael Z. Frantz and Carlos Molina-Jiménez and Thiago Heck and Sandro Sawicki and Fabricia Roos-Frantz},
title={On the Use of Blockchain Technology to Improve the Reproducibility of Preclinical Research Experiments},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 1: ICEIS,},
year={2023},
pages={173-179},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011851700003467},
isbn={978-989-758-648-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 1: ICEIS,
TI - On the Use of Blockchain Technology to Improve the Reproducibility of Preclinical Research Experiments
SN - 978-989-758-648-4
AU - Oliveira E.
AU - Z. Frantz R.
AU - Molina-Jiménez C.
AU - Heck T.
AU - Sawicki S.
AU - Roos-Frantz F.
PY - 2023
SP - 173
EP - 179
DO - 10.5220/0011851700003467
PB - SciTePress