As Mayo Clinic builds a suite of clinical tools based on patient data, it’s looking to new solutions to manage that data.
The health system and General Catalyst recently co-led a $24 million investment in TripleBlind, a startup whose analytics platform allows companies to collaborate without having to share raw data.
The Kansas City-based startup says the data never leaves its source, and developers’ algorithms also remain encrypted.
Instead of manually de-identifying data, such as removing information on ages and genders, TripleBlind encrypts it and only allows the data to be used one time by the appropriate entity. For example, a healthcare company could allow a pharmaceutical company to run an analytics operation one time, and only using the information necessary for that task, CEO Riddhiman Das said.
“If you never have the data, you are implicitly providing better security,” he said.
He sees it as an opportunity to speed up innovation in healthcare, by making it easier to share data, and provide it in a more timely manner.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Mayo Clinic Platform President Dr. John Halamka, who has been heading up several of Mayo Clinic’s digital health efforts, will join the startup’s board as an observer.
“Bringing together AI algorithms and data in ways that preserve privacy and intellectual property is one of the keys to delivering the next generation of digital medicine,” he said in a news release. “These novel privacy-protected solutions promise to usher a new era of collaboration.”
TripleBlind plans to use the funds to support its technology’s use by digital health and biopharma companies, though it also sees some potential use cases in banking and financial services.
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