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Using nothing more than a simple flask of saliva, millions of people have created DNA profiles on genealogy sites.
But this wealth of information is effectively inaccessible to genetic researchers, sites carefully preserving their databases, fearing a leak that could cost them dearly in terms of credibility.
Bonnie Berger, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her colleagues believe they can solve this access problem with a new cryptographic information protection system.
"We are currently at a dead end in sharing all these genomic data," Berger told AFP. "Researchers have a lot of trouble getting their data, so they do not advance science."
"Nobody can have access to help them find the link between genetic variation and disease," she said. "But imagine what could happen if we could exploit the millions of genomes that exist."
The idea of this new cryptographic method, described Thursday in the American journal Science, was developed as part of the search for drug candidates in datasets from pharmaceutical companies.
In a previous work, the researchers showed that the concept could be applied to DNA profiles.
Laboratories are constantly seeking to identify links between millions of drug compounds and tens of thousands of proteins in the human body, in order to identify good candidates for certain drugs.
But they do not want their competitors to know what they are working on. Often, their drug compounds are patented and secret. So, they do not share much.
SECRET SHARING
With the new scalable researchers' technique, the first one based on a secure "neural network", labs could share their sensitive data by dividing them between multiple servers that might look for new links based on the entire data sample .
But no entity would be able to access the initial entries, which could include confidential information, provided they do not collaborate.
Each entity would obtain results based on its contributions.
Berger says their technique is based on a cryptographic framework called "secret sharing".
Researchers have introduced new techniques of optimization and artificial intelligence in order to treat millions of chemical compounds or genomes to be analyzed.
"We can do something that was absolutely not possible before," said the MIT professor, noting that existing cryptography methods involved large-scale computer calculations and heavy communication costs.
Plus, they only work for thousands of data points, not millions.
The same technique could allow major genealogy sites, such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe, to open their databases to researchers and share them.
Ancestry has more than 10 million registered profiles, while 23andMe has over five million registered profiles.
Berger told AFP that she had been in contact with both companies about her findings.
Ancestry, 23andMe, MyHeritage and others offer physical, genealogical and sometimes even medical data, such as a history of cancer in the family. It is this information that researchers want to match certain genetic variations.
23andMe has taken a step in this direction via a partnership with the pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). A spokeswoman for 23andMe told AFP that scientific collaborations had resulted in the publication of about 100 research articles.
However, the company only provides researchers with a statistical summary of the results, in this format: "30% of men aged 20 to 35 years reported having been diagnosed with X disease and have variant / mutations of Y in common ".
And user participation is voluntary, which limits the scope of the results.
CONFIDENTIALITY ISSUES
The intersection of genetics and genealogy has made headlines in the United States. Last week, a new study showed that half of Americans could be identified from the DNA samples of their loved ones found in GEDmatch, a free website.
This technique was a boon for US police forces, who used it to identify suspects in very old cases dating back several decades, such as the "State Slayer", accused of 12 murders and more than 50 rapes committed in the middle of the war. 1970s
It can also be used by people looking for their biological parents.
But what happens if the data falls into the wrong hands? Hackers could potentially exploit the information for harmful purposes. Or what if insurance companies and others used it to discriminate against their customers?
Benjamin Berkman, a bioethics researcher at the National Institutes of Health, told AFP that there was "no real evidence of systemic discrimination," but said "that does not mean that this can not become a problem. "
"People are very concerned about the confidentiality of genomic information, which is one of the reasons they do not undergo genetic testing or do not enroll in research," Berkman said.
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