Treatment with convalescent plasma (CP) was recently approved by the FDA for seriously ill patients of COVID-19. There are many institutions and hospitals that have implemented CP programs, but they all face the challenge of finding sufficient and appropriate donors. The constraints of matching, imbalances in supply and demand, and privacy concerns pose several challenges to engage donors. Considering multiple stakeholders (patients, donors, hospitals), we will develop new algorithms based on multikey homomorphic encryption to protect the privacy of patients and donors, with additional functionality to simplify the registration process, and conduct optimization for plasma donation (of patients who recovered from COVID-19). We are dedicated to the public good and will make freely available the code / resources developed within the framework of this project. If we succeed, our project will build a secure national registry for potential plasma donors and may save many lives.
We are proposing a novel platform for convalescent plasma donation with integrated privacy protection and resource optimization. The goal is to remove the barriers and concerns for COVID-19 recovered patients to donate their plasma to save severely ill patients. This supplement grant extends our parent project with innovative homomorphic encryption model and a customized design to meet this urgent need.
