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MIT Researchers Develop New Way to Crowd-Source Drug Data

October 26, 2018

Researchers at MIT say they have developed a way for drug sponsors and researchers to share information without compromising private patient details or intellectual property.

There have been several efforts to create open-source programs to give researchers a searchable database for drug information and speed up clinical trials, but the researchers faced a paradox: Programs that were sophisticated enough to process the massive amounts of data for something like drug interaction couldn’t be safely encrypted and programs that could be safely encrypted couldn’t handle the massive datasets.

MIT researchers Brian Hie, Hyanghoon Cho and Bonnie Berger say they solved the riddle by building a neural network that relies on a program cryptographers call “secret sharer.” Rather than trying to run all the data through a large algorithm — which can get clogged up by non-numeric fields that ordinarily would be marked as “confidential” or “X” — the system runs several simple, blinded operations (basic division or multiplication) at once and then recombines them.

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