Israeli company helps US NIH fight coronavirus

Israeli data company MDClone is supporting the US National Institutes of Health in the fight against the coronavirus crisis.

The Beersheba-based company, established four years ago, provides big-data solutions for healthcare systems and works with organizations in several countries, including Israel, the US and Canada.

As explained to The Jerusalem Post by its chief commercial officer Josh Rubel, MDClone has developed a platform that will turn data from academic medical centers into researchable material while protecting patients’ privacy.

“The scenario with COVID19 is at pandemic level, but the number of cases in an individual institution is not necessarily high,” he pointed out. “In the US there are some two million cases now, but they are very spread out, so there is a real need to aggregate the data and make them available to researchers who are interested in understanding best practices, treatment options and the disease behavior.”

The NIH works with dozens of medical centers across the country.

The service offered by the company will ingest the data provided by them and maintain all its features, but create fictitious patients associated with them.

“Once aggregated, these synthetic sets of data present the same statistical property of the original data and we can make them available to researchers without any privacy issue,” Rubel explained. “If you have a 1000 patients in the original dataset and you want to look at 15 different attributes, we will consider those attributes in the population and then we will create a synthetic data set that maybe has 1002 patients and mirrors the statistical values of those 15 attributes. However, the patients are entirely made up and there is no way to re-identify them.”

The outcome of the process can help research within the NIH itself and medical centers associated with it, as well as other third parties working on treatments.

MDClone started cooperating with the NIH a few weeks ago. The first data load to the platform is set to happen in the upcoming days.

The number of patients whose data are going to be processed will be over 50,000. At the beginning the platform will receive data from three of the dozens of medical centers in the NIH network.

Once the data load starts, Rubel said the synthetic outcome is going to be available very quickly.

“The idea that an Israeli company can help make a difference for global research is very important for us, we recognize we have a huge responsibility to deliver,” he said. “It’s not often that you hear about a company in Beersheba engaged in something like this. We are very excited about it.”