A little saliva or a hair are things that may not be very important, but for pharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies can be a great source of information.

A little saliva or a hair are things that perhaps do not give much importance, but for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies can be a great source of information.

As genetics advances, scientists become capable of making important discoveries that can help to better understand the human body or find a cure for diseases that could not be treated until now.

To achieve this, they need many samples of different types of people.

These companies spend millions of dollars to obtain the data that come out of these samples, although in many occasions the individuals who contributed them did so in a disinterested way.

What if they could earn some money in return?

That's what the company Nebula Genomics, founded by the professor of the Harvard Medical School George Church, his student Dennis Grishin and the former Google employee Kamal Obbad.

Church, considered the "father of synthetic biology", was one of the first experts to design a direct method to sequence the genome.

Now, he participates in the creation of a company that wants to "give people the ability to be the owners of their own genomic information," according to their website.

Poor market

The company explains that the genomic data market moves billions of dollars and, however, is limited because the data it handles are scarce, fragmented and, rarely, standardized.

Also, getting them can be a very slow process.

So he proposes to reduce costs and increase the databases "eliminating intermediaries". Although, in reality, that is the role that Nebula Genomics will end up exercising.

The most novel thing is that the company will use the blockchain technology  (the software used to make transactions with digital assets) to maintain the anonymity of the users and that payments will be made with their own cryptocurrency.

Since 2001, it is possible to sequence the genome of the human being. Something that can help identify in advance what diseases we can develop in our lives and help us prevent them.

But, according to Church, it is precisely the high prices (around US $ 1,000) and concerns about privacy that discourage people from going to centers dedicated to this.

With Nebula Genomics, the user will control which company can acquire their information.

"Nebula could get enough people to do it to spread," he said in an interview with the British newspaper  The Guardian .

"Right now, sequencing the genome is like the Internet in the late 80's. It was there, but nobody used it."

"Then the first browser arrived and it began to be commercialized: it was its turning point."

Companies that want to access genomes will pay with cryptocurrencies that Nebula Genomics will create.

As explained by his partner Grishin to  The Guardian , individuals can earn "tokens" in exchange for conducting surveys until they have enough to pay for the sequencing of their genome and start renting the results.

Another option is for the company interested in the genome of a particular user to subsidize it.

Altruism

Church also participated in the founding of the Personal Genome Project in 2005, which sought to gather the genome data of 100,000 volunteers.

12 years later, however, the initiative has barely got a tenth.

"This is for people who feel especially altruistic or who have an illness in their family, want to receive high priority research and are willing to give up some privacy," he told the newspaper.