Establish an open architecture for secure data collaboration. That was the 2016 founding mission of Duality Technologies, a software development company based in New Jersey. 

Now, the company’s taking that collaborative spirit to health equity, thanks to a $6 million contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) that it received on September 24 to develop its SQUEEZES framework, which enhances privacy and allows researchers to securely access and combine data from different sources without compromising patient privacy.

ARPA-H formed in November 2022 to accelerate health research and outcomes for patients after Congress approved $1 billion in funding for the Department of Health and Human Services division’s first three years. So far, the agency has awarded projects for research on tissue regeneration and cell and mRNA therapies.

Kurt Rohloff, CTO and co-founder of Duality Technologies, said this latest investment into Duality Technologies will help the company create a safe way to share health data between providers and researchers.

Keep reading here.—CM

Healthcare sharing arrangements (HCSAs) are built on a premise that, at first glance, might sound like health insurance: You pay a monthly fee and pool your money with like-minded people to pay each other’s medical bills.

Many of these HCSAs are Christian nonprofits known as healthcare sharing ministries. Members—who often must abide by a code of conduct—join to “support each other as the early Christians in the Book of Acts joined together to meet each other’s needs,” the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries shares on its website.

The reality is less simple. 

While healthcare sharing ministries may offer lower upfront costs than traditional insurance, they don’t typically cover as much. HCSAs are not health insurance plans and are not required to comply with the protections offered by the Affordable Care Act.

An October 1 report from the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies’s Division of Insurance, the state’s insurance regulator, sheds some light on HCSAs’ practices and prevalence.

Keep reading here.—CC

Advances in biological AI models have shown promise when it comes formulating new drugs. But can the technology also find ways to treat rare diseases with existing medications?

That’s what researchers at Harvard Medical School set out to learn with a new foundation model designed to do just that. The TxGNN model, described in a recent paper in Nature, is purportedly the first AI system that seeks to pinpoint already approved drugs that might specifically treat rare diseases for which there are currently no treatments on the market.

These diseases might be rare on their own, but taken together, the more than 7,000 conditions classified as such affect around 300 million people worldwide, according to The Lancet. And only 5%–7% of these ailments currently have drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Meanwhile, nearly one-third of drugs approved by the FDA end up with more than one approved use later on, often as many as 10 or more, the authors write.

The problem, according to the team, is that discovering these new uses tends to be “a serendipitous and opportunistic endeavor”—doctors more or less stumble upon them in the course of working with patients.

Keep reading on Tech Brew here.—PK