ProtChain: a blockchain-enabled framework for secure and reproducible biomedical IoT data workflows

The rapid growth of biomedical Internet of Things (IoT) systems has intensified the challenge of ensuring secure, interoperable, and reproducible data workflows across distributed devices, laboratories, and repositories. Conventional repositories such as the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and UniProt provide standardized data formats, yet they lack scalable mechanisms for real-time synchronization, provenance verification, and trusted sharing in IoT-driven environments. This article presents ProtChain, a blockchain-enabled framework that integrates a permissioned PureChain ledger with decentralized storage (InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)) to deliver secure and high-throughput biomedical workflows. Designed with a microservices architecture, ProtChain enforces Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-256 encryption, role-based access control, and seamless application programming interface (API) connectivity with bioinformatics repositories. A prototype case study using the HIV-1 protease (1HPV) demonstrates end-to-end ingestion, provenance verification, and retrieval of proteomic data. Performance evaluations show throughput of 485.96 requests per second under 50 concurrent workloads, with blockchain transaction rates reaching 445 transactions per second (TPS) at 10–25 transactions per block, validating scalability for IoT-based biomedical research. By combining blockchain immutability with decentralized storage and standardized APIs, ProtChain addresses pressing challenges of interoperability, data trust, and reproducibility. The results establish ProtChain as a trust backbone for next-generation biomedical IoT ecosystems, enabling secure collaboration, verifiable research pipelines, and scalable healthcare applications.