Life science and healthcare stakeholders need to use sensitive data in several ways. Sensitive data needs to be protected against unauthorized access. Protection of data may be required for legal or ethical reasons, for issues pertaining to personal privacy, or for proprietary considerations. Especially important but complicated this is when sensitive data comes from several sources and countries.

An aim of systems biology is to understand biological functions by modelling metabolic interactions and processes. Different modelling techniques have been developed and applied. Out of these, the use of genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) stands out as a widely applicable approach ranging from optimizing industrial production of commercially-relevant chemicals to studying disease patterns, be it within a set of human tissues or across animal model organisms. GEMs are complex and powerful tools.