Connect source material, derived samples, datasets, analyses and onward research across participating organisations, creating shared provenance without requiring every participant to migrate to one operational system.
A biobank or research consortium typically spans several participating organisations, each contributing source material, derived samples, datasets or analyses, and each running its own laboratory, storage and data systems. The consortium agreement usually specifies what can be shared and under what conditions. It rarely specifies how the provenance connecting a derived sample back to its original donor material, or a published analysis back to the dataset and samples behind it, will be preserved once several organisations and several years are involved.
That gap tends to surface at exactly the moments it matters most: when a participant leaves the consortium, when a sample is requested by a new research group, when a finding is challenged, or when a funder or ethics body asks for a complete account of how a piece of data has been used and by whom.
The BioChain does not require every participating organisation to migrate onto one shared operational system, which is rarely realistic for an established consortium. It connects the provenance between the records each organisation already holds — source material, derived samples, datasets, analyses and the research built on them — so the relationships survive independently of any one participant’s own infrastructure.
If a founding participant left the consortium tomorrow, would the provenance connecting their samples to everything derived from them survive?
For many consortia today, the honest answer depends on that organisation’s own records staying intact and accessible indefinitely — an assumption that shared, independent provenance is specifically designed to remove.
The five steps are the same everywhere. Here is what each one connects in this context.
No. It connects the provenance between the records that software already holds, across the other organisations in the consortium.
Yes. The BioChain preserves provenance relationships; what each participant is permitted to see or use remains governed by the consortium’s own agreements and access controls.
Provenance records can reflect a change in consent or a withdrawal request; what happens to derived data as a result is governed by the consortium’s own ethics and consent framework, not by The BioChain.
The aim is to connect records that already get created during normal operation, not to impose a new parallel data-entry process.