Duality Technologies joins the fight against cancer with a new secure data collaboration toolkit enabling analytics and AI on Oncological Real-World Data

Duality partnered with Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, MIT and additional leading research organizations to analyze Oncological Real-World Data while protecting privacy and confidentiality to enable safer, quicker, and more effective data collaboration in healthcare.

HOBOKEN, N.J., Aug. 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Several of the world’s most prestigious medical research organizations have partnered with Duality Technologies, the leader in secure data collaboration for enterprises and government agencies, to deliver a major breakthrough in sharing Real-World patient data securely and efficiently to advance medical research and improve oncological patient outcomes.

Leading medical and computer science research teams, together with Duality’s experts in privacy-enhanced technologies, worked together to achieve this major innovation in the pursuit of better health care, including:

• Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
• Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center
• University of California, San Diego, CA
• Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, at UC Berkeley
• MIT

Poor data collaboration slows down progress in oncology research
Real-world data (RWD) is routinely collected from patients and captured in electronic health records, medical claims, disease registries, and more. This data is used to generate Real-World Evidence (RWE), which is essential in the development and success of treatments. To reach sufficiently large cohorts of patients for research, and to enrich the data by linking data sets, medical centers must often collaborate with other organizations. Without guaranteed patient privacy and regulatory compliance, however, stakeholders are often reluctant to do so. This data collaboration challenge hinders progress in medical research, negatively affecting the pace at which new potentially life-saving cancer treatments are introduced to the public.

More efficient, privacy-preserving healthcare collaboration is possible
The result of the joint work between Duality and its partners was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), in a paper titled ‘Collaborative Privacy-Preserving Analysis of Oncological Data using Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption’. The paper proves that secure collaboration on Real-World Data in healthcare is now feasible and efficient. By using a combination of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), all regulatory, computation accuracy, and performance requirements were met. This solution developed by Duality satisfies security and privacy compliance by design, making it easier and faster to attain and analyze previously hard-to-access, but necessary, clinical and genomic RWD.

Prof. Alexander Gusev from Dana Farber Cancer Institute, commented, “Cancer research is increasingly driven by large-scale data, but the discoveries are only as good as the data we can actually use. This ability to reliably, safely, and quickly collaborate on sensitive data enables major medical research breakthroughs both for oncology and for data-driven research more broadly.”

Dr. Ravit Geva, deputy director of the Oncology Division and head of the Clinical Research & Innovation unit of the oncology division at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, said: “There is always a gap between promise and reality with big data. We need to be able to combine data from different centers while protecting the privacy-related interests of individuals whose data we are using and to preserve data ownership as well. Our joint study with Duality aimed and verified the accuracy of statistical oncology endpoints when done through encrypted data. The secure analysis yields accurate results compared with the currently used conventional data management and analysis methods on Collaborative Real-world Oncological analyses without revealing patients’ protected health information.”

Creating a data privacy platform that fights cancer
PETs are cryptographic and hardware-based tools that address data privacy challenges by enabling the analysis of sensitive data while protecting it by encryption or by hardware during the analysis.
Dr. Yuriy Polyakov, Ph.D., Vice President of Cryptography at Duality, explains, “Our toolset supports survival analyses, logistic regression training, and common descriptive statistics. Using Real-World oncological data sets, we demonstrate that the toolset achieves high accuracy and practical performance, which scales well to larger data sets. The toolset we offer is general-purpose and can be applied to other collaborative medical and healthcare application domains.” The approach enables multiple new analyses of clinical and genetic data using both federated and private join modalities of collaboration. This proof marks a significant milestone in healthcare research as previous methods were found to be out of compliance while accurate, or in compliance but without the necessary accuracy for such use cases.

Dr. Polyakov continues to say, “Using these advanced technologies on their own is quite complicated as it is. Overcoming technical challenges by combining these technologies will clearly have a deeply meaningful impact on the world, and I’m very proud of our team for what they have accomplished.”

Read the full PNAS paper here.

About Duality Technologies
Duality is the leader in privacy enhanced secure data collaboration, empowering organizations worldwide to maximize the value of their data without compromising on privacy or regulatory compliance. Founded and led by world-renowned cryptographers and data scientists, Duality operationalizes privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) to accelerate data insights by enabling analysis and AI on sensitive data while protecting data privacy, compliance, and protecting valuable IP. A World Economic Forum (WEF) Tech Pioneer and a Gartner Cool Vendor, Duality is recognized by numerous industry awards, including Fast Company 2023 World Changing Ideas award, 2023 CyberTech 100 Most Innovative Companies list, 2022 CB Insights’ AI 100, the 2022 RegTech 100 Awards, and the AIFinTech100 2022 Awards. Learn more.

About the Partners
Since its founding in 1947, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts has been committed to providing cancer patients with the best treatment available today while developing tomorrow’s cures through cutting-edge research.

Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (TASMC) is a leading academic medical center in Israel with a long history of innovation in healthcare. The center is home to several world-renowned research programs, including the BRCA1/2 Hereditary Cancer Center and the Center for Personalized Medicine. TASMC is also a major clinical trial site for pharmaceutical companies and other research organizations. Read more about their efforts to accelerate breakthroughs in oncological research.

CONTACT: Derek Wood, dwood@dualitytech.com, +1 917-310-1175, mhughes@dualitytech.com

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SOURCE Duality Technologies, Inc.