How Faster COVID-19 Research Is Being Made Possible by Secure Silicon When Intel and Leidos set up a "trusted execution environment" to enable a widespread group of researchers to securely share and confidentially compute real-world data, it was no small achievement. (Image: bestber via Adobe Stock) Viruses are slippery things. They adapt and change and sometimes surprise you with a new trick in the wild – a mutation, a rare side effect that they didn't first produce in a lab setting. These surprises are part of why it's so critical for medical researchers to collect and share real-world data about what a diverse patient population is experiencing right now, outside of a lab, so that the best treatment can be found quickly.