A global leader in healthcare data management, analytics, and access, BC Platforms (BCP) announced a new strategic partnership with TripleBlind, a US-based company. It will help drive the development of privacy and intellectual property rights (IPR), preserving “federated AI” for its BCRQUEST.com Global Data Partner Network.

The partnership aims to enhance BCP’s contribution to the Finnish-led PRIVASA (Privacy-Preserving AI for Synthetic and Anonymous Health Data) consortium, which recently received EUR 6.5 million funding from Business Finland for developing methods for the safe utilization of sensitive data.

The PRIVASA project, which will last two years, aims to increase access to and exchange anonymized health data to help Finnish health technology companies compete in foreign markets. The BCP has proposed federated AI learning methods to train machine learning algorithms without performing actual data exchange. This method allows BCP to address data governance and privacy requirements, as individual-level data never needs to leave its institution of origin.

BCP’s collaboration with TripleBlind will strengthen this federated AI definition by ensuring IPR security and encrypting analyses and results with its cryptographic technology.

Timo Kanninen, CSO and Founder of BC Platforms (Biocomputing Platforms), said, “In partnership with TripleBlind, our new federated AI learning platform, which is based upon data from BCRQUEST’s global genomic and clinical database network, could significantly speed up research and development without compromising on patient privacy or IPR. AI has the potential to transform healthcare from a “one-size-fits-all” medicine approach to a personalised one, where individual treatment plans can be tailored for each patient, leading to an improved quality of care and significant cost savings.”

Riddhiman Das, CEO and Co-Founder of TripleBlind, said, “We are excited to be partnering with BCP, coupling our next-generation private data sharing technology with BCRQUEST’s data network for use in research environments with strict regulatory standards including GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. We look forward to enabling the network to share and collaborate with the vast amount of data that today is unaccessible and uncommercialized due to regulatory concerns. By improving privacy, we will enable the use of richer, more diverse third-party clinical and genomic datasets, facilitating the development of more accurate and less biased novel AI-based models.”

PRIVASA consortium considers BC Platforms as one of the key corporate partners, along with the University of Turku, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), and several notable industry partners include Bayer, MVision, Fujitsu Finland, PerkinElmer, and Polar Electro.