AminoChain

AminoChain develops infrastructure that connects research participants, their consent, their biological samples and the resulting data. Its two main products are a Research Platform, used to build and manage longitudinal research cohorts through follow-up, recontact, reconsent and repeat sampling, and a Specimen Center, a search application that lets researchers locate and license samples across a global network of biobanks. The company also operates its own physical biobank facility, where consented samples are collected, stored and chain-of-custody tracked on site and linked back to each participant's consent and longitudinal data through the Research Platform.

The company's first application was the Specimen Center biosample marketplace, which aggregates biobank inventory so researchers can find and license specimens more quickly. Its founder has described using blockchain to track and encode biosamples as digital assets, with programmable rules that allow patients to follow where their samples go, and has framed the current priority as integrating blockchain-enabled features into the platform its users already rely on. Earlier public code repositories include a monorepo and subgraph built for the 2022 Chainlink Fall Hackathon, now archived.

Founding story

Founder Caspar Barnes, originally from South Africa, developed a malignant melanoma at age 12 and was told the excised biopsy sample had to be retained for study; his mother signed a consent form and the sample was never seen again. Pursuing life sciences, he later conducted research on donated cancer tissue as a graduate student at Columbia and found there was no way to return findings to the patient who had supplied the sample, because the sample's origin was unknown to the lab. He holds a BA and BSc in economics and neuroscience from UCL and graduate degrees from Columbia and Harvard. Seeking technical co-founders, he joined Antler in New York, attended a hackathon where he met self-taught engineer and co-founder Max Matthews, and assembled an engineering team to build a prototype.

Business model

AminoChain licenses its Participant Portal, Study Management System and API integrations directly to customers, and alternatively operates as a contract research organization (CRO), recruiting and managing a defined cohort on a sponsor's behalf. It also operates a biosample marketplace through which researchers locate and license specimens from participating biobanks.

Revenue is generated from software licensing of the Participant Portal, Study Management System and API integrations, and from CRO services for cohort recruitment and management; the Specimen Center supports licensing of biosamples from the biobank network.

Traction

Per the Antler founder profile: a team of 14, a network of 22 biobanks, tracking data on roughly 350,000,000 biospecimens from more than 100,000 patients, and approximately 100 researchers served across large pharmaceutical companies, the National Institutes of Health and universities. An initial biobank pilot reportedly tripled that biobank's biosample distribution over three months.

Latest developments

Following the September 2024 seed round led by a16z crypto, the company has expanded its offering to include a Research Platform for cohort management alongside the Specimen Center marketplace and an owned physical biobank facility, and offers CRO services in addition to direct software licensing. The founder has described the current priority as integrating blockchain-enabled features into the platform its existing users already work with.