Inspired by the Obama administration’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative, two professors joined forces to create CancerBase, a database allowing patients to share personal medical data to further cancer research. Stanford associate professor of bioengineering Jan Liphardt, Ph.D., and University of Southern California professor of medicine and engineering Peter Kuhn, Ph.D., created the database to give patients an opportunity to share their diagnosis and their location without revealing their identities. “So that’s the simple idea: A global map and give patients the tools they need to share their data — if they want to. They can donate information for the greater good. In return, we make a simple promise: When you post data, we’ll anonymize them and make them available to anyone on Earth in one second. We plan to display this information like real-time traffic data. HIPAA doesn’t apply to this direct data sharing,” said Liphardt.
Full Story