Anonymizing patient genomic data for public sharing association studies.

Fernandez-Lozano C, Lopez-Campos G, Seoane JA, Lopez-Alonso V, Dorado J, Martín-Sanchez F, Pazos A.

Source

Information and Communications Technologies Department, University of A Coruña, Spain.

Abstract

The development of personalized medicine is tightly linked with the correct exploitation of molecular data, especially those associated with the genome sequence along with these use of genomic data there is an increasing demand to share these data for research purposes. Transition of clinical data to research is based in the anonymization of these data so the patient cannot be identified, the use of genomic data poses a great challenge because its nature of identifying data. In this work we have analyzed current methods for genome anonymization and propose a one way encryption method that may enable the process of genomic data sharing accessing only to certain regions of genomes for research purposes.