Poster

Jonas Karsten (TU Berlin), Ernesto Martinez (TU Berlin), Marta Gonzalez Gomez (TU Berlin), Benjamin Heurich (DBU, IABC), Norman Trapp (Sartorius), Alexander Gierse (Siemens), Stefan Krauss (Siemens), Peter Neubauer (TU Berlin), M. Nicolas Cruz Bournazou (TU Berlin)

Research data in biotechnology are often fragmented across laboratories, instruments, software systems, and institutional data silos. Even when data are generated according to FAIR principles, their cross-institutional discovery, reuse, provenance tracking, and controlled exchange remain challenging, particularly when intellectual property, data sovereignty, and trust between collaborating organizations must be preserved. 

The BMFTR funded DATIpilot Innovation Community "BioBlock" addresses these challenges by developing a FAIR data trading marketplace for biotechnology. The platform combines FAIR-by-design data generation and semantic interoperability with knowledge-graph-based discovery, enabling research data and related digital assets to be found, contextualized, evaluated, and reused. A permissioned consortium blockchain provides a shared trust layer for verifiable provenance and transparent transactions, while smart contracts govern access, licensing, exchange, and attribution. Tokenization enables datasets, models, digital twins, and other knowledge-related resources to be represented as traceable digital assets while maintaining off-chain data sovereignty and IP protection.

BioBlock follows a community-driven innovation approach organized as a decentralized Community of Practice, complementing technical development with a social and organizational layer for decentralized governance, participatory decision-making, cross-institutional knowledge exchange, and community engagement. This enables researchers and stakeholders to collaboratively develop practices, norms, standards, and governance structures for trusted FAIR data sharing and provides a framework for their continuous adaptation to emerging community needs. Future developments include community-driven standardization of biotechnological metadata and data models to improve semantic interoperability and reproducibility, AI-assisted FAIRification, and agentic collaboration for automated negotiation, licensing, and knowledge exchange. BioBlock thereby aims to establish an interoperable and trustworthy socio-technical ecosystem in which technological infrastructure and community governance jointly transform FAIR research data from isolated resources into discoverable and reusable assets for collaborative biotechnological research and innovation.