The blockchain technology is supposed to create solutions and opportunities in our daily life, and recent developments have shown that its potential can reach even the most unimaginable scenarios. As a matter of fact, the health department can also reap the benefits of its adoption, and in an especially sensitive situation: helping people with cancer.
Austrian government announced at the start of the week that it will show its support to a cancer research organization headquartered in the United Kingdom that is implementing blockchain technology in order to detect the feared disease, according to a press release.
Lancor Scientific and a Noble Cause
The company in question is called Lancor Scientific. It has managed to produce a device that can identify several types of cancer and then use smart contracts and blockchain technology to record the screening results.
Lancor Scientific has the intention of opening a research lab in Graz, one of the biggest cities in Austria. The company is shooting for, at least, 90% screening accuracy in its product, just like Google’s Lymph Node Assistant.
The laboratory, with the backing and support of Austrian government, will investigate the market conditions and establish the viability of Lancor’s Tumour Trace OMIS (Opto-magnetic Imaging Spectroscopy) device and the use of AI and blockchain technologies. The primary intention is to “deliver low-cost and near real-time cancer screening at scale,” according to Fintechzoom.com.
A Pro-Blockchain Country
Margarete Schrambock, currently acting as Austria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, praised the initiative involving experiments with the blockchain technology in the country’s government, identifying it as an area of interest. She said that it is “definitely one of the new important technologies, and that “in addition to Artificial Intelligence and Speech Recognition, it is one of the big issues we want to highlight in the coming period of the EU Presidency.”
According to the press release published by specialized site Cointelegraph, the research company will also collaborate with local educational institutions on projects looking for additional medical solutions. Some of them are the Technical University of Graz, the Medical University of Graz, and the Sigmund Freud University Vienna.
The government will collaborate with Lancor Scientific, providing grants to the company over a five-year span for research equipment, training, clinical trials management, and facilities, among other things.
Since the beginning of its implementation and adoption, Austria has shown all signs to be a very pro-blockchain nation. The country has long supported the technology and the use of cryptocurrencies, even including them in regulations and in legislation. Vienna, the capital city, has hosted several attempts to increase awareness about the subject, even a cryptocurrency bank last year.
The Eternal Struggle with Cancer
Cancer has long been one of the most feared diseases because of its unpredictable nature and aggressiveness. For decades, researchers have tried to come up with a cure without much success, but they have worked tirelessly to try to detect it at an earlier stage so the probabilities of survival and quality of living can increase.
According to a study conducted by Vyssoki et al, results show that cancer patients have an increased risk of suicide, relative to the general population in Austria. The psychological burden or discovering the disease at a terminal stage is often too much to handle, so Lancor, together with the Austrian government, is working to find a way to a much more accurate and quicker system of screening.
By Andres Chavez
