Data is the new gold in clinical research. With thousands of blood cancer patients being diagnosed and treated yearly all over Europe, their medical data offers a huge opportunity for a deeper insight, paving the way to disruptive clinical innovations. However, processing sensitive clinical data demands the highest privacy standards and the guarantee that no one can track it back to specific patients.

Now, the latest technologies in cryptography, federated learning and secure multiparty computation have met at the Josep Carreras Institute to create SECURED Innohub, a one stop collaboration hub able to provide a secure and trusted environment for decentralized, cooperative processing of health data and anonymisation assessment to health data providers and users, anywhere in Europe. In the event, held on 03 and 04 December, representatives of all the partners in the SECURED initiative have strengthened their bonds and walk together towards their shared goals.

“Within the SECURED project, we’re working on a use case focused on predicting the risk of different cancer types”, says Dr Eduard Porta, head of the Cancer Immunogenomics lab at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, one of the 17 centres in the SECURED consortium. On this regard, Dr. Porta adds that “together with our partners, we’re exploring how to train AI tools in a secure, privacy-preserving way and how to make predictions for specific patients while keeping their data protected end to end.”

Indeed, the Josep Carreras Institute team is developing a range of AI models to help diagnose and treat patients with blood malignancies in the real world, one of the biggest challenges facing computational biology nowadays, and do so in a secure way, making sure patient data is fully protected all the time, and that the whole workflow complies with the strict European privacy regulations and legal frameworks.

The consortium will showcase the SECURED architecture capabilities and usability with the launch of four pilots: real-time tumour classification, confident tumour evolution prediction in children to allow the extension of telemedicine in paediatric patients, synthetic data generation to increase statistical power and cross-border remote access to patient genomic data.

SECURED project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101095717.