NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Sophia Genetics has launched a $1 million initiative, supported by the Swiss Commission for Technology and Initiative, to develop encryption methods and standards to protect data transfer between patient registries in hospitals and genomic platforms.
Sophia is partnering with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne to develop alternatives to current data protection techniques for the Sophia DDM genomic analysis platform. Current methods make healthcare data unusable for analysis and diagnostics, according to Jean-Pierre Hubaux, a professor in the institute's school of computer and communication sciences. Hubaux's lab researches privacy protection methods for personal data such as genomic information.
"Sophia is already the most advanced regarding genomics information and it is now a matter of moving forward with metadata, making sure we connect the dots to leverage the various data points, with the end goal that their analysis will help physicians take better clinician decisions," he said in a statement.
The planned solution will "address the issue of keeping data and medical records secure while still enabling the consistent, systematic, server-based analysis that clinicians need to make diagnostics decisions," Sophia Genetics' CEO and founder Jurgi Camblong said. "In the long term, it will allow us to help patients quickly by accessing, swiftly and securely, information about similar cases, and which treatments have been effective for which patients," he added.