468: Upending Outdated Approaches to Medical Research & Enabling Universal Access to Medical Care with the CURE Chain (with Jim Nasr & Jacob Beckley)

Brian Nichols  
faced with an uncertain future many business owners and technology professionals don't have time needed to invest in their business technology strategies and as a result are afraid of their technology getting outdated and putting their company and customers information at risk. The digital future is already here. But with all different choices in the marketplace, it's difficult to know which one will be the best fit for you and your strategic vision. Imagine having the peace of mind that your business is backed by the right technology investments that are tailored for your specific needs. Hi, I'm Brian Nichols and I've helped countless business owners and technology professionals just like you helping you make informed decisions about what technologies are best to invest in for your business. Voice bandwidth, cybersecurity, business continuity, juggling all the aspects of business technology is messy. Let me help at the Brian Nichols show.com forward slash help and sign up for a free one on one consultation with yours truly to dig deep into where you see your company headed and how we can align your business technology towards those goals. Again, that's the Brian Nichols show.com forward slash ELP. To get your simplified business technology started today, instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, happy Thursday there folks, Brian is here on The Brian Nichols Show. And thank you for joining us on of course another fun filled episode. I am as always your humble host and today we have well we have a two for one special How about that we have one returning guests and one new guests and the returning guests you know him as recently as last week because folks I heard nothing but good things in terms of Jacob Beckley in the Beckley foundation. Everybody was a static to hear about what he's doing over there with a cure token. And now we're going to talk about the actual architecture behind it cure chains. With that Jim Nasr and Jacob Beck, please return to the program. Jim, you're joining us here in the program, gents. Thanks for joining the program.

Jacob Beckley  
Thank you, Brian. Yeah, thanks for having me back.

Brian Nichols  
Absolutely. Thank you for returning to the program. And like I mentioned there in the the intro, we are really excited because number one, the audience loved our last conversation, Jacob, but they want to hear more, they want to learn more about how this works. How cure chain isn't just working from a cryptocurrency perspective, but it's actually gonna be changing and revolutionising the way that the healthcare industry really performs and acts across the board. So let's start off here, Jacob, the audience got the chance to get to know you last last week, two weeks ago or so at this point. So how about this? Let's do a quick introduction for Jim to join the program. Jim, if you could, a quick bio and what brought you a part of this greater cure chain network team?

Jim Nasr  
Sure. Thank you, Brian. I appreciate you. Firstly, having me on board, really pleased to to connect with you and your audience. Really my background, I am a software developer, technologist architect, by profession. And then, over the last many years, last seven, eight years, I've been largely focused in the healthcare space. I was at the CDC for a couple of years and led software development, there was the chief Software Architect there. And then from there, I worked another couple of years in a clinical research organization and quite a bit direct interaction in clinical research and working with with mainly large scale farmers. And then for last three years to three years, really working with our own company called a core on building, essentially building technologies that, you know, in this new lingo, use systems of truth, mainly blockchain technologies to help be accountable, be transparent, and really help improve healthcare. I think that's, that's a real tie between kind of where my head is at and where Jacob is at, in that. I think we both believe and over the course of a number of conversations, this has been really echoed that healthcare requires people like us who have a technological background, innovation background, to come in, and really actually make some things happen. I think, I think there are a lot of people who have good intentions, but not necessarily the right skills. And a lot of people frankly, front end don't necessarily, I guess, have a disincentive to really innovate because they make a lot of money. The way things are, I kind of feel like perhaps this is where Jake and I have a lot of common ground that that we have. We have a real kind of, I guess energy and enthusiasm for for actually making making some things happen in a space. And I think our track record more or less proves that. So that's really that's really where the segue comes in. Jake and I've spoken many times over the last 668 months about this, and I've been very pleased to see how you know, he has almost single handedly kind of grown Kyoto again. And really, as I mentioned, we're We're technologists we have we have built a lot of software. And we think that there's, there's a nice opportunity to bring our technology, our you know, kind of Barbie doll and skills and map it to its vision.

Brian Nichols  
I love it. And Jacob, let's maybe turn back towards the episode from last time, just as a refresher, because for the audience who's joining us, maybe for the first time, Jim's a debt, identifying a lot of the the problems that he's going to help solve, but what were those problems that you identified in the healthcare industry that you want to see solved?

Jacob Beckley  
Well, I think it's simple. You know, the reality is, I learned this from the pandemic. You know, as I said, everyone knows now that I work in innovation, so I'm always dissecting problems and trying to figure out root causes and try to figure out, you know, what resonates and what works in order to craft something different through innovation and come up with something new. And what I discovered during the pandemic, and everybody realized that, it's that we were able to come out as a global resource come out with a, a vaccine, very quickly, multiple vaccines, in fact, and it just happened differently, everything kind of all the handcuffs were taken off. And when you break that problem down into the root, I guess, the enablers of that solution, it was broken down into access to data, being at the core different than anything had done at a global scale like that. Also, researchers stopped working in these pockets in silos all throughout the world. You know, research, unfortunately, is done in vacuums, a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times. And, you know, there was also that incentive, and motivation, you know, the motivation being, you know, I didn't want to die, you know, and you didn't, we didn't know how bad this was going to be, or how, how the cascading effects and we still don't know how long the cascading effects are going to be here. But, but by analyzing that and breaking it down into those segments, it's quickly apparent that through the proper technology, and proper use of technology, and Jim touched on it, but on leveraging blockchain technology, we can enable that to occur in modern day research, you know, and that's the vision is how can we enable research, to move faster, you know, get the get the breakthroughs faster, be more efficient, you know, not like spin cycles and waste resources. And, you know, I really believe that cure chain is one of the solutions, not the final end all be all, but it's one of the solutions, that's going to help solve that problem. And I want to apply it to research first, and then we can see where it goes from there. But but as everyone knows, my Foundation has been focused on on funding pediatric cancer research for many years. And, you know, my background in technology, my background in innovation, the launch of cure token, and and meeting up with with Jim Nasser has just kind of enabled all of this to come together. And just a perfect sort of, sort of storm where I feel we're going to be able to truly innovate in a space, that's it's really hard to, to innovate in.

Brian Nichols  
Yeah, well, and one of the things I was going through, and I was looking at some of the the stuff that you guys have been looking at, and I would love, Jim, for you to dig into this idea of de LT anchoring. And and this is gonna be addressing one of the main problems that that Jacob mentioned here, and that was the access to data and and the fact that that was so difficult, and how this is going to help solve that problem. Jim, could you dig into that a little bit? Yeah. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  
no doubt, Brian. So like. As Jake mentioned, the data that we deal with in healthcare research is siloed is all over the place. So one of the underlying issues is, can you trust the data? Is it timely? Is it the latest data? Was it consented correctly? Is it authentic? All these questions are difficult to answer when you don't really know what when you don't fully control data. And I think we are long past the days of saying, let's just have one gigantic database, you name it vendor of your choice, IBM, Oracle, whoever, yeah, let's just put everything inside their system and have one vendor of choice, Amazon, whoever manage it. I think that's that's just never going to happen anymore. And for a lot of very good reasons. So I think the real question is, and this is really where for Jake and I are very much in line is to go and innovate in the future, you need to meet to think interoperable data. So data is coming from different places, you don't necessarily control the source of data. So then the question is, well, how do you make sure that the data, as was mentioned in the beginning is authentic? Is is you know, the person who touched it was actually allowed to touch it, and did it in a way that was accountable. And that's really where this distributed ledger technology anchoring comes in. And it's very, very simply, we have the ability especially if you if you implemented correctly, this is not you know, general statement because if you don't implement it correctly, it may not be fast enough and may not be meant to be affordable enough to be usable enough, but I think it can be done in In a way, where are all those things are met. But really what it amounts to is that when you, for instance, touch somebody data, you record at the same time you record an immutable, essentially pointer transaction reference on a public ledger says XYZ entity in a privacy preserving manner, touch this, this data and here's a consent that allowed them to do so. And sometimes that consent comes directly from an individual, like me, I'm providing my, my health profile, and a clinical researcher can look at it for inclusion in a clinical trial. So if that is truly being done, that that individual can also be incentivized could be remunerated in some shape or form. And that's really where I think we get into, we can essentially kind of promote that much more virtuous cycle for data usage and accountable, you know, kind of research in this way, as opposed to what it is now, I think it's much more of a vicious cycle. And very much untrusted. And I'm telling you, from my own experience, you know, even having dealt with a very large scale with federal government, where you know, you think you know, where your data is coming from, in most cases, you'd have to do a second, third, fourth revisit to the original data source of data to verify whether or not that data was legitimate or timely or the work with consented. And all of that makes it very inefficient.

Brian Nichols  
Jacob, how easy will this make healthcare innovation and advancing and research in the future? Well, I

Jacob Beckley  
believe it's going to completely flip it on its head. You know, the, the system by which all of this occurs today is a very legacy process, very legacy workflow, very legacy system. Many More times than not even today, researchers are spending much most most of their time filling out grant forms and applying for grants and all that that's the end goal is let's get let's get them out of that process. So that they can do what they want to do people go on to research because they want to change the world, they want to find cures, they want to find breakthroughs and cure cure chain, I think is going to be the vehicle to enable that to occur. You know, we're talking the tech side of things. We're talking, you know, the onboarding of data and the incentivization. From a economic perspective for both researchers and patients. But inevitably, the end goal here is to expedite how fast things can occur. So I think it's going to have this cascading effects throughout not just research. I mean, that's, again, where things are starting. But I think the healthcare system in general, I think, if we look at the problem differently, and stop looking at it from a top down approach, and flip it on its head and say how can we have a massive impact in in our stake in healthcare, and that's through innovation is through community. But it's also through ownership of our information, our data, monetization, potentially of our data. And you know, but as Jim says, it's, you know, it's about proving that that data is authentic, that it's accurate, that there's consent that that data can be accessed. And the best part about the blockchain as well. And where I think blockchain technology is gonna have a massive impact on healthcare, is that it is anonymized. You know, it's not tied to Jacob directly. It's tied to, you know, the idea of an individual. And there's other demographical information that we can append to this health information. And it's just an extremely valuable resource. And, and the problem is, is that it's not accessible, you can't trust it, as Jim mentioned, but also people aren't incentivized to want to share it. And I think if people were incentivized to share their information they would. And they also want the transparency of knowing how their information is being used, how is it being accessed? what research is it being utilized in. And by combining all of those sorts of things, there's a value chain, throughout this entire ecosystem, which we can, I think, directly impact the effects of positive research and how fast and rapid those breakthroughs occur.

Brian Nichols  
It's exciting stuff. Because I mean, and you actually, were going exactly where I was actually gonna ask this question about the privacy aspect, because I know that's gonna be one question that's always gonna get asked. And let's talk about the actual infrastructure, what this will look like. Because it's great to talk about this from just the idea and how great it will be. And then everybody in the world of sales knows one of the hardest parts is helping make the solution real for the person. So let's make it real for your average person. What does this actually look like, from a nuts to bolts standpoint, Jim, and I'll direct towards you because obviously, you're gonna have a much more deep dive approach here to the actual architecture. Sure, sure.

Unknown Speaker  
Right. And, you know, to be honest with you, and this is really where I think Jacob is against the iqi. You know, it's easy to talk about these concepts, you know, they're kind of high D concepts and they kind of resonate, but but unless you can make it real, it's really not It doesn't move any kind of a needle. In fact, it can be a reverse impact and it can become jaded. So really where we're reracked is that we have actually built a number of, if you like modules or components of what what cure chain looks like. And like many of them, as example, this this idea of DLT. And Green Bay, you mentioned, Brian, we'll be working to build a production, we've already done, I think, the Hadera hash graph network agreed on by 20 million production, data stamps. So there's plenty of evidence that we can do it and can get a scale, it can do it in different ways to apps through QR codes, you know, through API calls. And in fact, Jake and his team have already seen was that we have also, and we didn't necessarily talk about this, but Bible mentioned it, we have also kind of figured out a very innovative and novel way of using non fungible tokens to essentially show authenticity of consent or like a particular ownership of a data set. So not not the NFT is that you hear about in context of content creators, or music and JPEGs, and things like this, but much more, it was raw definition of a kind of a unique global reference, if you like token, which is really just just a set of numbers, they can use it then point to any kind of digital asset. And we have built this technology called rice hash, it allows us to very, very quickly and extremely cheaply and large scale associate an FTC consented to datasets and things like this. And really, the net abundance is a word that we kicked around quite a bit with Jack, and the team on Monday is this idea that we can get to the master ability very, very quickly, because a lot of this infrastructure, a lot of tools already built, you know what, what needs to be kind of, essentially tailored together is a context. You know, there's some some elements around tokenization that we sought to work through. But much of this is already proven technology that that's working in other other areas and other parts. So our whole thinking is like it just like I was mentioning in the beginning, in terms of data interoperability, you don't need to go back to 2.0 to do really useful things. It's much better for us to say, how do we repurpose some of this open technologies, open API's open source, things that people have built, that are best practice, and then just assemble them correctly, and put them in the right in the right business models. And that's really it, to be honest with you this is this is the direction, you know, I feel very confident that at least for the for the near timeframe, near being being kind of thought of in six to 12 months, that much of what we need is already there. We have already figured out an infrastructure that again, Jay and FEMA have seen that uses multiple cloud infrastructures are all in fact, all three of the big ones, Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure, in a multi cloud deployment very seamlessly. We do a lot of work around privacy, preservation updated that goes on the ledger, again, gigantic, I've seen this where we do one way pseudo anonymization of data that goes on the ledger, I lost about a detail details that I don't necessarily need to go to at this moment. But but all to say a lot of this really has been done in other context with other clients. And some were excited to kind of bring it together and really kind of drive this idea of Kyogen being something that becomes hopefully a standard if not the standard for for clinical research. That's so

Brian Nichols  
cool. Like the fact that six to 12 months is a realistic timeline is like one of the most exciting things I can think about because that's like, that's not one of those, you know, pie in the sky visionary goals. This is like a realistic this could happen this year, or next year. And that's pretty darn cool. So let's get people excited, because I'm sure there are going to be people out there who want to get involved. So if you're in the clinical research world, or if you're in the healthcare industry, and you're trying to figure out a way that you can get involved with the cure chain, Jacob How can folks go about doing that?

Jacob Beckley  
Well, today, the easiest way is just reach out to me, you know, I'm totally accessible, but you can find a little bit of information at Cure token.com Or at the Beckley foundation.org, which is the foundation aspect, but we're currently in development of, you know, kind of a few key areas, you know, the, the, the websites, you know, to provide more information in literature, we're going to be producing a white paper, which would be a very thorough explanation of how this is going to come into life. And as Jim mentioned, you know, the, the monster ability of this, we are we are working, you know, we're gonna make this happen pretty fast, you know, and get into demoing it, start ingesting data, start seeing how researchers can utilize this and what we need to pivot on. You know, this idea is going to evolve, you know, this is not a, an idea that is, is baked, this is going to iterate and there's gonna be an evolution to it. But but there's There's tons of ways that they can learn about, but obviously reaching out to us is going to be the easiest.

Brian Nichols  
So when I'm in the world of sales, we lay out everything that looks great. But then there's also things that we have to be aware of that are gonna hold us back. So I'll just jump ball here, and I'm not sure who wants to take this question, but what do you foresee being the biggest roadblocks to getting this in action?

Jacob Beckley  
I don't know. You know, that's, that's a good question. Because in the innovation process, you know, those are the those are the things you tackle first, you know, the hardest things. And, as Jim mentioned, this has been proven, you know, in other context, he's proven it, you know, so it's a matter of reassembling in a different type of context and structure. But the reality is, from a technology standpoint, there really isn't anything that isn't possible that we need to worry about that is going to prevent us or be a barrier. Once we get further along there. There may be things more around compliance, more around, you know, government regulations, health care regulations, but Jim has a lot of experience in and we're also assembling a team of people who have a lot more experienced than both of us, both on the research side, as well as just compliance. So at this point, I think time is probably our biggest barrier, we want to move fast. But but as far as feasibility, I think we we've seen it, I've seen it, this is this is truly within our reach and within our grasp, and we're going to get there as fast as we can.

Brian Nichols  
It's exciting stuff. Jim, anything you want to add in terms of the overall architecture, the infrastructure that is pure chain?

Unknown Speaker  
Yeah, what I would say is we are and really this is our business, but Jake is also fully kind of on board with this. We are building technologies that really from by design, are secure, privacy, preserving, and, and scale. And those are not easy thing. I mean, they're very easy to say, don't get me wrong, anyone can say it. They're not easy to build and easy to build in a way that becomes a repeatable process. But that's really where we differentiate ourselves. That's kind of that's my background, again, having built a lot of these very big systems. But with that kind of a mindset with the compliance mindset. Jake mentioned compliance as example. You know, we are fully aware of, for instance, HIPAA compliance and PHSI, PII kind of have restrictions that they have a how to anonymize data that I was mentioning Hobbies, pseudonymise. It it goes on the ledger. But we're also aware of, for instance, the J, the general data protection regulations in Europe, which protect individual's rights. In fact, part of our product rights hatch is very much built around this idea. We're aware of, for instance, what's going on in California with what's called the CCPA, California Consumer Protection Act, and many other ones that many other rules and regulations that they're kind of coming on, which are really good, because essentially, the the gist of them is to protect the individual's rights. And and if I know, Brian, you know this already. And certainly Jake does that this whole movement towards towards web web three, oh, is really partially to do with with empowering the individual. So it's very much part of my thinking this, this idea of a building things that ultimately help the individual on their rights, and we don't become another intermediary. Right. So so a lot of my thinking is even at the low level of technologies, not to build things that become white elephants and silo technologies, because just because he called the blockchain enable something that's just a sexier label for a bad solution is not interoperable. So a lot of those things go through our head. And, you know, those are the kind of things I think, you know, make me excited by the by the future it is,

Brian Nichols  
it's all exciting stuff, honestly, like the future is truly, it's gonna just be awesome. And I know, like, everybody looks around. And it's so easy to just Oh, doom and gloom, but the things that are being done behind the scenes, there's so much to look forward to in terms of the technological advancements and what that's going to be able to do for society. I mean, if we are able to solve the problems we see in healthcare in a fraction of the time, just think about the time the energy, the effort that can be spent and also the resources in other areas versus the prolonged and in many cases, siloed activities, it is truly going to be a different world a different future for healthcare. And hey, we have two of the most instrumental pieces here in that movement with Jim and Jacob joining us so that being said, Folks, please do us a solid and make sure you support the amazing work that they are doing over at the cure chain but also over at the Beckley Foundation, Jacob where can folks go ahead and support the Beckley foundation and find you

Jacob Beckley  
they can go to the Beckley foundation.org We are a nonprofit organization. We do. We do provide grants as well. So come there if you're interested in Know any families that need support financial support, who are going through some struggles with pediatric cancer we'd be we'd be happy and privileged to be able to support them.

Brian Nichols  
And obviously double check the episode from last week or so I'll make sure I put that link in the show notes as well. Because there's a great deep dive into exactly what you're doing there for helping fighting pediatric cancer. Jim, where can folks go ahead and find you if they want to continue the conversation?

Unknown Speaker  
Yeah, certainly. I'm also quite easily accessible. I'm on Twitter at J NASA. J. naasr. A website is acorn.com. A co er, I'm on LinkedIn, happy to connect with folks. And yeah, certainly I think both Jacob and I really kind of believe in in the mission behind this. So you know, hopefully that's echoed in how we present ourselves.

Brian Nichols  
Gentlemen, thank you so much for an awesome conversation, folks. Please if you enjoy today's episode, I'm going to ask you to do me a solid go ahead and give it a share. And when you do, please give these two fine gentlemen a tag and also give yours truly a tag as well at B. Nickels liberty. With that being said, it's Brian Nichols signing off. You're on The Brian Nichols Show for Jacob Beckley and Jim Nasser. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Brian Nichols Show.

Unknown Speaker  
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Brian Nichols  
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