The origins of Tune Insight: reinventing health data sharing to unlock its value without compromising on privacy

Healthcare systems are changing. Their transformation is driven by a widely acknowledged fact: no single institution has the data required to push forward research, improve healthcare pathways, and develop clinically useful and responsible AI models, at least not alone.

This conclusion became clear to the Swiss University Hospitals in 2016. They realized that to deliver on the promise of personalized medicine, medical teams need more data—more relevant data, more comparable data, more representative data.

As a result, the Swiss Personalized Health Network embarked on an ambitious project with the goal of allowing healthcare facilities to work together to analyze their data without ever losing ownership of it. A formidable scientific, technical, regulatory and logistical challenge.

Frédéric Pont, cofounder and COO of Tune Insight, explains how this moment marked the start of the adventure that would cumulate in the founding of Tune Insight.

A clear need: sharing data without exposing it

“To be truly personalized, clinical models have to be able to compare a specific patient to other individuals with similar characteristics. But the more precise these criteria become, the more unlikely it is that a single hospital will have enough similar cases. So expanding the research to other facilities becomes essential.” explains Frédéric Pont.

The problem facing Swiss University Hospitals was clear. They needed access to more data, without ever moving, centralizing or revealing patient data.

Data sharing was therefore vital, but at the same time almost impossible. There were three major obstacles:

• A strict yet shifting regulatory context: GDPR, new Swiss data protection laws, Ethics Committees…
• Questions of governance: no facility wants to lose ownership of its data. Any transfer whatsoever can be perceived as a risk.
• Technical limitations: how is it possible to analyze data across several sites while guaranteeing it is never revealed?

Working together without sharing data: EFPL’s contribution

The hospitals contacted the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) Data Security Laboratory, led by Professor Jean-Pierre Hubaux, in search of a solution. Aware of the strategic and social importance of the challenge, Professor Hubaux decided to bring in an expert in the form of Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza, specialist in applied cryptography and genomic data protection.

The growing team dedicated themselves to this critical issue, ultimately developing an approach that combines homomorphic encryption and secure multipartite computation so that statistical analyses can be carried out and AI models developed without ever revealing or moving the raw data. “Today, this innovation is called Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption (MHE). It is patented, published, and has been successfully tested on real-world hospital use cases.” says Frédéric Pont.

Thanks to this pragmatic, strategic leap, institutions can finally work together while maintaining complete sovereignty of their data.

The creation of Tune Insight: transforming academic innovation into operational capacity

As Frédéric Pont explains, “Tune Insight was founded in 2021 with a clear mission: to allow all actors to share their health data safely, without exposing, transferring, or losing control of it. That’s when I came on board.”

The Tune Insight model is based on three strategic principles:
1. Data hosting stays local: no centralization, no pooling, no unnecessary copies.
2. Each participant retains complete sovereignty for its data, rules, authorizations and utilization.
3. Collaboration is de-risked, verifiable, and supervised by technical safeguards.