Could Salesforce Blockchain Cut Cancer Drug Development Costs in Half?

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Good afternoon, readers.

Dr. Laura Esserman is on a mission to bring the blockchain to health care.

I can already hear the audible groans and see the general eye-rolling—I get it. There have been plenty of bold claims when it comes to blockchain, the decentralized ledger technology, in pretty much every sector from food to medicine. So far, the sizzle to steak ratio has been out of whack, and skepticism is integral to good science.

But Esserman, a renowned surgeon and director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, believes blockchain can slash the cost of cancer drug development while spurring new innovations in breast cancer treatment.

That’s why her team at UCSF, partnered with a number of key stakeholders, is testing out a proof-of-concept using Salesforce Blockchain to share clinical trial lab results with researchers, Esserman tells Fortune. The initiative will be discussed at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference on Thursday.

“We don’t have the technology to automate this sort of data collection,” Esserman says in a phone interview.

The details are a bit sparse (it is, after all, a proof-of-concept). The UCSF project is in conjunction with Quantum Leap Healthcare, a non-profit that’s fueling a breast cancer clinical trial program dubbed “iSPY2.”

The ultimate goal here is to bring the cost of cancer drug development down to five years and $500 million—literally half of the 10 years and nearly one billion dollars currently required to produce such treatments.

Just how would that work out in practicality? Esserman explains that the current clinical trial and drug development process is riddled with uncertainty, especially when it comes to data collection and integrity.

For instance: The baseline for what qualifies as an acceptable liver function level for a potential clinical trial participant can vary wildly based on who did the test, where it came from, and what criteria were used to assess the numbers. Blockchain could simultaneously universalize and democratize that process, according to Esserman.

That’s because this system could automate a process that is still, in this digital age, reliant on flesh-and-blood humans to assess, record, and analyze something as basic as lab reading.

“I can see, with blockchain, what the normalized numbers are for someone enrolling in an iSPY trial,” she says, adding that data re-entry and redundant practices can drive up the cost of a clinical trial 30% to 60%.

Blockchain could potentially provide both accountability and efficiency on this front since everything is linked together in a documented chain-of-custody—a practice that is surprisingly foreign to American health care.

It will be a while before we know whether such a proof-of-concept shakes out in the real world. But, clearly, some medical readers are willing to give it a shot.

Read on for the day’s news.

Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy

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