Ring study of patients suffering from focal segmental glomerulosclerosis as a proof of concept for federated proteomics.

Quantitative mass spectrometry has transformed proteomics by allowing the simultaneous quantification of thousands of proteins. To boost statistical power, it is necessary to increase sample sizes by combining patient-derived data from various institutions. However, this practice raises significant privacy concerns. We created this dataset comtaining 30 healthy donors and 30 patients suffering from focal segmental glomerulosclerosis - a rare kidney disease - and distributed them to three independent proteomics centers. This distributed data were used as a proof of concept to introduce FedProt - the first privacy-preserving tool for collaborative differential protein abundance analysis of distributed data.