The data privacy landscape has changed quite significantly in the last few years, and when it comes to healthcare data especially, there is an even stronger requirement for higher levels of protection.

It’s on this premise that Decentriq and Roche, the leading healthcare company headquartered in Switzerland, have started working together to explore how they can enable new and exciting opportunities on healthcare data collaboration thanks to the use of Decentriq’s data clean rooms.

In a webinar hosted by Microsoft, Pierre Cholet, Head of Business Development at Decentriq, and Asad Preuss-Dodhy, Data Privacy Lead at Roche Diagnostics, uncover how data clean rooms work and how Decentriq is leveraging Azure Confidential Computing and Intel SGX to offer unprecedented privacy and security guarantees.

The webinar, titled “Decentriq Data Clean Rooms: spotlight on its applications in Healthcare”, is available to watch as part of Microsoft’s Azure Confidential Computing Partner Webinar Series. During this insightful conversation, Pierre and Asad explain how data clean rooms can address the challenges around patient data sharing in healthcare.

The collaboration between Decentriq and Roche

Decentriq and Roche started working together in 2021. Roche was looking for a solution that was ready to scale up and, at the same time, meet the needs for high security and confidentiality standards. “Selecting Decentriq meant that it did tick many of these boxes, and we are really excited and looking forward to our collaboration and see where it takes us,” says Asad.

Thanks to the collaboration with Roche, and the ongoing feedback received as a result of it, Decentriq was also able to make improvements to its product.

“We've tremendously improved the user experience to the point where our data clean rooms can now generate a synthetic copy of the data, which preserves the privacy of the patient’s data, but gives a lot more flexibility to the users,” says Pierre. He continues: “On one hand, [Decentriq] gives the flexibility of combining any data; on the other hand, the full guarantee that the privacy of the patient will be preserved at all times during the collaboration. This would literally be impossible without such technology.”

The use cases

During the webinar, Pierre and Asad illustrate some of the use cases to which Decentriq’s technology can be applied. One of them involved a common activity performed by diagnostic companies: the development of new biomarkers. Those are often shared with partners to generate and analyse data and, for various reasons, this data cannot often be shared back with Roche, therefore it has to be analysed by the partners (healthcare provider or other institutions) themselves.

“As you can imagine, with limited resources sometimes these analysis get in the backlog and it can take a long time before we can get the results,” says Asad. “With the use of data clean rooms,” continues Asad, “we can collaborate with these institutions and help them analyse that data while they can be fully confident that the data is in their full control, and that no one else - neither Decentriq nor Roche - has access to the raw data itself.”