Two pilots to test Tune Insight secure health collaborations

The first deployment will evaluate feasibility for data collaborations between Swiss hospitals using two cancer data cohorts from the university hospitals of Lausanne, Geneva and Zürich, in conjunction with the SPHN-funded Swiss Personalized Oncology Project (SPO).

Prof. Olivier Michielin, Head of the Precision Oncology Center at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), Switzerland, asserts that “Tune Insight’s solution is a perfect fit for multi-site and cross-jurisdiction medical analyses where data security and privacy is paramount. I have personally witnessed the development of their platform since its inception in 2016, when it was an academic project between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV). They have proven to be world-class and highly reliable when addressing the data privacy and security challenges towards personalized medicine in oncology, and I trust that their response to these challenges fully aligns with the needs of larger datasets for improved treatments in other domains.”

The second pilot project will evaluate feasibility for generating accurate reference ranges starting with laboratory data from the university hospitals of Lausanne and Bern, the Kinderspital Zürich and the Paraplegic Center in Nottwil, in conjunction with the SPHN-funded Swiss BioRef project. Prof. Alexander Leichtle, Head of the Computational Medicine research group at the University Institute of Clinical Chemistry at the Inselspital Bern, states that “reference ranges for results of blood tests are a very common tool used in daily medical practice. The quality of the reference ranges strongly depends on an adequate representation of the diversity of the population - which in turn is a strong argument for multi-site approaches as e.g. Swiss BioRef. Here, the solution of Tune Insight makes the inclusion of various sites -even across borders and regulatory frameworks- very simple without the need of sharing the original data.”

Testing and opening new perspectives

While the two pilot projects aim at testing collaboration among Swiss hospitals, the Tech4Trust platform could also open the door to future data collaborations with third parties. Dr. Katrin Crameri, Director of the SPHN Data Coordination Center and SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics’ Personalized Health Informatics Group, highlights that “this collaboration with Tune Insight is a critical step from the previous project grant awarded to CHUV and the EPFL Laboratory for Data Security (where Tune Insight was incubated) towards SPHN’s vision of harnessing health-related data for exploration and research purposes without compromising patient privacy.” Tune Insight co-founder & CEO Dr. Juan R. Troncoso Pastoriza adds that “while Tune Insight provides a platform for secure collaborations on sensitive or confidential data between multiple organizations across all verticals, including financial services, insurances or cybersecurity, we provide full-stack solutions for specific applications, such as healthcare, for arguably the most sensitive type of data, health data”.

(Press release)