With the ongoing progress in analytical and sequencing technologies, secure and privacy-preserving distributed access to and use of biospecimen-derived data has become the bottleneck of collaborative work in personalized medicine and beyond; first attempts - for instance during the BBMRI Preparatory Phase with their “Expert Centres” model - rely on traditional legal and organizatorial approaches to ensure privacy, confidentiality, and security. We present here a framework of secure multi-party computation; in particular tailor-made for bioinformatical analysis by statistical modeling as common in, e.g., genetic association studies. This system implements the privacy-by-design-paradigm and allows geographically and/or institutionally heteregenous collaborations while ensuring the non-distribution and non-accessibility of sensitive information (either privacy related or intellectual property related) to participants, while still allowing them to use the data.

This work is pursued in collaboration with Prof. S. Katzenbeisser, Security Engineering, TU Darmstadt.

Kay Hamacher is Professor of Computational Biology & Simulation at the TU Darmstadt. His work focus on modern aspects of information in and of biological systems. He started his academic carreer by obtaining a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 2001 and research in the larger field of computational physics at TU Dortmund, Germany. He continued this work at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe from 2001-2002. From 2002-2006 he worked at RWE Systems as a management consultant in the field of IT-security and corporate finance. From there he moved on to become a Liebig-Fellow of the Fonds der chemischen Industrie as a PostDoc in J.A. McCammon's group at the University of Californica, San Diego and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2004-2006). In 2006, he was nominated a Distinguished PKS-Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden. From 2007 on, he heads the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics group of TU Darmstadt and works in the Dept. of Biology, the Dept. of Computer Science, and the Dept. of Physics.