Secure and Federated Genomics
Hoon Cho (Broad Institute and MIT)
Colloquium
Tuesday, February 28, 2023, 3:30 pm
Abstract
Most genomic data are held in silos due to their sensitivity. This presents a key barrier to progress in genomics, as analyzing data from large and diverse cohorts is critical for ensuring that the fruits of research benefit a wide range of individuals. In this talk, I will describe our recent advances in enabling collaborative genomic studies with privacy-preserving algorithms. Synthesizing a range of modern techniques from applied cryptography, distributed algorithms, and statistical genetics, we develop efficient secure and federated algorithms for essential analysis tasks in genomics. These include the two most widely-used methods for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) based on principal component analysis (PCA) and linear mixed models (LMM). We demonstrate our methods on large-scale genomic data collections including hundreds of thousands of genomes. Finally, I will highlight our recent efforts to deploy our tools to jointly analyze two biobanks in the US, which has heretofore been infeasible due to data sharing restrictions. Our work lays the foundation for broader collaboration in biomedicine.
Bio
Hyunghoon (Hoon) Cho is a Schmidt Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2019. Previously, he received his M.S. and B.S. with Honors in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research focuses on overcoming key computational challenges in analyzing massive and distributed biomedical data, creating modern tools from applied cryptography and machine learning. He is especially interested in solving problems in the areas of biomedical data privacy, single-cell genomics, and network biology. He is a recipient of the NIH Director's Early Independence Award.