Patients’ data is critical to rare disease innovation, but it does little to help advance progress if it is not widely accessible to researcher. RARE-X is a nonprofit working to bust data silos through a federated data-sharing platform and empower rare disease patient communities to more easily gather, structure and securely share critical data through a common platform. We spoke to Nicole Boice, co-founder and executive director of RARE-X, about the problem RARE-X is seeking to address, the technology and expertise the organization has been able to bring together, and why data sharing is essential to accelerating the diagnosis or rare diseases and development of new treatments to treat them.