Research data storage

Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute Partners with Distributed Storage Solutions to Store Critical Research Data

24 August 2023

The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute has teamed up with Distributed Storage Solutions (DSS) to store data from its groundbreaking cardiac research on Filecoin, the largest decentralised data storage network.

The Institute has already stored 125+ TiBs (137.439 TB) of cardiac research data on the Filecoin network.

This includes raw datasets from published papers consisting of thousands of images of cells and encrypted backups of the SyncroPatch machine, a laboratory technique for studying currents in living cells.

Filecoin is making a huge difference to the way the Institute’s world-leading research data is being stored. It provides a unique service that not only allows data from key research projects to be stored for perpetuity, but also ensures the integrity of research data through the use of unique content identifiers.

DSS has managed the preparation and transition of the data from Web 2 service providers to the Web 3 application Filecoin and is Australia’s largest Filecoin storage provider.

 “Given that many of our projects increasingly generate huge raw data sets, this is incredibly important for the Institute to be able to partner with Distributed Storage Solutions and Filecoin.

“It’s vital that we can easily and safely share open-data sets with like-minded researchers to advance heart disease research that will benefit patients the world over,” says Todd Ryman, IT Director at Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute.

"We're thrilled to work with the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and aid its life-saving research," says Stefaan Vervaet, Head of Network Growth at Protocol Labs, an ecosystem contributor to the Filecoin network.

"Filecoin's open services for data are ideally suited to ensure the preservation and accessibility of cardiac data while safeguarding its availability for further analysis and research endeavours. We want scientists who develop medicines for global illnesses to have at-their-fingertips access to each other's datasets and studies. Establishing a new frontier for the open-source, decentralised technology movement, this milestone solidifies Filecoin's position as a legitimate challenger to legacy centralised infrastructure.”

Filecoin ensures that provable security and authenticity checks are in place, such as content addressing and cryptographic storage proofs, to verify data is stored correctly and securely over time, which is essential in storing health research.

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For all media enquiries and interview requests, please contact:

Julia Timms
Head, Media & Communications
j.timms@victorchang.edu.au
0457 517 355