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Viruses are slippery things. They adapt and change and sometimes surprise you with a new trick in the wild – a mutation, a rare side effect that they didn't first produce in a lab setting. These surprises are part of why it's so critical for medical researchers to collect and share real-world data about what a diverse patient population is experiencing right now, outside of a lab, so that the best treatment can be found quickly.
Historically, though, securely sharing and computing large datasets has been a clunky, arduous, and even impossible process. It makes collaborative medical research more difficult, and it slows down the medical community's ability to respond to real-world data.
So when Intel and Leidos set up a "trusted execution environment" that enabled a widespread group of researchers to securely share and confidentially compute real-world data about COVID-19, it was no small achievement.
The Usual Way "There are a multitude of challenges" to this type of research, says Chetan Paul, CTO of Leidos, an IT systems integrator and service provider.
As Paul explains, most patients have several providers: a dentist, an eye doctor, a general practitioner, a cardiologist, etc. Each physician will have their own system. Certain health records – like medical images or DNA data – are very large files. There are strong regulations protecting the privacy and restricting the portability of health data.
The first challenge is the administrative headache of getting point-to-point data sharing and data u ..
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