Tag: Recent News

I am very pleased to announce that, today, Microsoft is committing to the Open COVID Pledge by making its patents available free of charge for use in efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic and minimize the impact of the disease.  This step joins our other efforts to use technology and innovation to help track the disease and develop solutions, such as mobilizing AI for Health to fight COVID-19 and the Bing COVID19 Tracker. Additional information about Microsoft’s COVID-19 efforts can be found here.

We are always looking for ways we can use our patents to contribute to positive outcomes, and the fight against COVID-19 is one of the most urgent issues of our time. Pledges and open licensing of this kind can help spur innovation, especially in a crisis like this one. Researchers, scientists and others working to fight the virus should be able to develop and deploy effective solutions at scale without obstacles such as being threatened with patent litigation.

The terms and conditions of Microsoft’s COVID-19 patent license, which are effective immediately, can be found here. We encourage other intellectual property holders, including other technology companies and universities, to also commit to the pledge and ensure that their intellectual property is working for, and not against, efforts to stop the pandemic.

Tags: COVID-19, Open Data

Microsoft has joined with national, state and local healthcare authorities and providers, researchers, non-profit organizations and governments around the world on our shared mission to develop solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve partnered with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a Coronavirus self-checker tool, worked directly with hospitals to protect them from ransomware, launched a Coronavirus tracker on Bing, provided AI to decode immune system response to COVID-19 and will continue to embark on many other scientific, technical and logistical efforts to help the global community navigate new challenges and needs.

As countries and companies focus on technologies such as tracking, tracing and testing to fight the pandemic, it’s critical that we also protect people’s privacy. Today, we’re offering seven principles as ideas to consider as we move into the next phases of helping to fight this pandemic.

Governments, public health authorities and industries spanning the globe are engaged in the hard and important work of identifying a path forward to get society back together again. Tracking individuals who are infected, tracing those with whom they have recently come into physical contact and making testing available to those contacts may play an important role in managing the next phase of COVID-19 around the world. As in all other aspects of modern life, digital technologies are likely to be used for tracking, tracing and testing. This requires special care, as sensitive data about our location and health status may be involved.

Preserving privacy as we develop and implement these technical solutions will be critical. Here are seven privacy principles that we offer for governments, public health authorities, academics, employers and industries to consider as we collectively move forward into this next phase of tracking, tracing and testing, and using similar technologies developed to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

1. Obtain meaningful consent by being transparent about the reason for collecting data, what data is collected and how long it is kept. Data should only be collected with consent and used in the manner explained when people are making the decision to participate. Clear and user-friendly information serves to help promote voluntary participation and can ensure everyone interacting with the technology is making informed choices to participate in data collection and is aware of the purpose of the data collection, the type of data that will be collected, the time period the data will be held and the benefits of the data collection.
2. Collect data only for public health purposes. The data collected from an individual for purposes of tracing those who have been in physical contact with an infected person and other public health purposes is owned by the individual and should remain under that person’s control. As a general matter, this data should be used by public health authorities only for the articulated public health purposes, and not for unrelated reasons. Public health authorities should provide input regarding the types of data that will be most useful for fighting the pandemic.
3. Collect the minimal amount of data. Data that is collected by public health authorities for public health purposes, such as tracing, should be limited to only the specific data required, and should only be collected and used for the time period identified as necessary by public health experts.
4. Provide choices to individuals about where their data is stored. The data must be wholly in the individual’s control, including allowing the individual to choose where to store this data, such as on a device or in the cloud.
5. Provide appropriate safeguards to secure the data. Reliable security safeguards such as de-identification, encryption, rotating and random identifiers, decentralized identities or similar measures should be in place to protect people’s data from harmful exposure and hacking attempts.
6. Do not share data or health status without consent, and minimize the data shared. An individual’s data or health status shouldn’t be shared with the individual’s contacts or others without securing the individual’s meaningful consent. If such sharing is pursuant to legal requirements, then the sharing should be strictly limited by the scope of the law. When notifying individuals that they may have been in physical contact with an infected person, only share the minimum amount of data necessary to protect against inferences about the identity of the infected person.
7. Delete data as soon as it is no longer needed for the emergency. Individuals own their own data, whether stored on a device, a server or in the cloud. Copies of the data that were transferred to public health authorities and others for tracing and other public health purposes should be deleted when no longer useful for public health purposes, as defined by public health authorities. None of the individual’s information should be retained by the authorities or others for future unrelated uses or purposes.

These principles are designed to apply to any COVID-19 technological solutions that involve the collection and use of personal data such as health data, precise geolocation data, proximity or adjacency data, and identifiable contacts.

Our approach is grounded in the belief that, for technology to succeed, people need to be in control of their data, and be empowered with information that explains how their data will be collected and used. Furthermore, companies need to be accountable and responsible for this data. Policymakers, advocacy groups and regulators are starting to share their ideas about guidelines to preserve privacy in any deployment of tracking, tracing and testing technology. We don’t have all the answers, and we look for others to contribute additional ideas, but we hope our principles help advance the discussion.

We need to fight COVID-19 and protect privacy

Addressing global problems of this magnitude understandably creates an urgent need for innovative uses of data to fight the pandemic, and we believe these measures must take privacy into account. The good news is that, today, we have more tools and methods than ever – such as differential privacy, federated learning, decentralized identities, privacy-preserving contract tracing protocols and open source repositories, and other techniques for managing data privacy – to allow society to use data for good and be confident that personal information is kept private.

In the U.S., the need for this conversation in the midst of a pandemic underscores the urgency for a strong federal privacy law. An updated legal framework placing obligations on businesses that collect and use personal data would help provide the necessary guardrails for companies to know how to protect and respect personal data as they create tools and technologies to address urgent societal needs.

Considering the bigger picture

In the context of rising excitement about the possibility of leveraging computing technologies to help with mitigating the pandemic, we note that the issues with, and opportunities for, helping with COVID-19 are complex. Technical advances, such as the use of mobile phones to collect data of various kinds, need to be considered in the larger context of the complexity of the world, such as how comfortable people will be sharing data, the availability of testing resources, the efficacy of the methods under realistic situations of usage, and evolving local and national policies. Concerns over any technology or program include inclusion and the potential for systematic discrimination based on numerous factors. For example, different populations may face different challenges when attempting to participate in health-centric programs based on access to, and familiarity with, technology, depending on race, age, education and income levels. These are also vital issues to address as we move forward.

Privacy and ethical concerns must be considered as we move forward to use data responsibly to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft is committed to serving as a constructive partner in this fight.

Tags: COVID-19, data collection, data privacy, Privacy

The world is searching for ways to fight COVID-19, leading to a surge of research efforts to create effective therapies. Thankfully, as the human immune system learns to fight off the disease and people recover, we see some very promising ways that people’s naturally produced antibodies, which are present in convalescent plasma, can be used as treatment for others. The use of convalescent plasma is a technique dating back to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and was effective more recently during the SARS outbreak. Today, there is mounting clinical evidence that plasma collected from those who have recovered from COVID-19 can be used to treat ill COVID-19 patients.

There are two core approaches to using convalescent plasma to fight COVID-19 – each serving a different need. First and most direct is the approach of gathering convalescent plasma donations and making transfusions available to patients, for either therapeutic purposes or, more frequently, as part of research studies and clinical trials. This is a pragmatic and meaningful effort and we applaud all the organizations involved.

A different approach is to use the plasma in larger scale to make a potential therapy called a polyclonal hyperimmune globulin (H-Ig). Through the product manufacturing process, multiple plasma donations are pooled together and the antibodies are concentrated to consistent and reliable levels, meaning the medicine can be delivered in lower volumes and therefore would likely take less time to administer to patients than plasma itself. The H-Ig process also minimizes risk of any known virus or bacteria passing from donor to patient, thanks to the rigorous virus inactivation and removal steps that are embedded in the plasma product manufacturing process. Finally, H-Ig also has a longer shelf life, which permits easier storage and shipping for any outbreaks in the future. These attributes also make H-Ig relatively easy for hospitals to manage and distribute this potentially lifesaving medicine to patients.

The question is, how can we scale up the manufacture and distribution of H-Ig treatment? One promising approach has been developed by the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance, which has been formed by the world’s leading plasma companies: Biotest, BPL, LFB, and Octapharma along with CSL Behring and Takeda. The “I” and “g” in CoVIg-19 stand for immune globulin, which the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance will use to create an investigational medicine. With advisory support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, these leading scientists, innovators, and experts in drug manufacturing have joined together in an effort to accelerate the development of a potential H-Ig therapy for COVID-19. They are collaborating across key aspects such as plasma collection, clinical trial development, and product manufacturing. Plasma-derived therapies, like H-Ig, have already been shown to be effective in treating severe viral respiratory infections. The combined capability of these leading commercial manufacturers gives us hope for a scalable, reliable and sustainable treatment for COVID-19.

At Microsoft, we conducted a careful (but rapid) assessment, including consultation not only with our own experts but also several external partners. This assessment involved gaining an understanding of the underlying science and potential medical benefits. We are now convinced that the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance has a real chance to save lives, at significant scale, and possibly much sooner than other approaches currently being developed. We were also impressed that these alliance members had committed to working together for the public good, setting aside commercial and competitive goals. We are thus devoting our computing infrastructure, plus engineering and research personnel, to support this esteemed group and kick off the first phase: helping healthy individuals who have recovered from COVID-19 to sign up to donate plasma at licensed plasma collection centers across the United States. Together with the alliance partners, we’re launching the CoVIg-19 Plasma Bot, a self-screening tool that anyone can use to see if they qualify to donate their plasma. Like Microsoft did with the CDC Coronavirus Self-Checker bot and more than 1,300 other COVID-19 bots around the world, we’ve followed standard protocols to help guide individuals through the qualification and education process.

The Plasma Bot and the home page and donor recruitment site for the alliance will live at https://covig-19plasmaalliance.org/ and we expect to make the bot available through other web, social and search channels as well to maximize awareness for potential plasma donors. Donation should be fairly convenient in most cases: more than 50% of the eligible donor population in the U.S. lives within 15 miles of one of the 500 centers operated by CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance member companies. Recruitment will start in the United States, and then expand to Europe.

The sooner recovered COVID-19 patients donate convalescent plasma, the sooner the alliance may be able to start manufacturing a potential therapy and begin clinical trials. These trials will determine if this therapy could help high-risk COVID-19 patients recover and whether it could protect high-risk individuals from the disease. Time is of the essence: we’re now in an especially important but small window of opportunity with a critical mass of people hitting peak immunity as they recover from COVID-19.

Like many of you, we’ve felt overwhelmed at times by the changes that COVID-19 has brought on society. But even more so, we’ve felt incredibly encouraged seeing people across the planet coming together in truly heroic ways to respond to this pandemic. With this new program, we have a chance to make even more people heroes, starting with those who’ve survived COVID-19. Please take a moment to share this with potential donors, so we can all play our part in making a difference.

Tags: COVID-19