Lifebit has been awarded a three-year contract by the University of Cambridge to provide a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) for the NIHR BioResource.

Secure access to biomedical data

The NIHR BioResource is a national research platform that connects researchers with volunteers and provides access to health data and biological samples. It supports research across common and rare diseases and the development of new approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

The BioResource currently supports access to data from more than 350,000 consented participants, including genetic, clinical, lifestyle and metabolomic information. Researchers from academia, industry and the NHS can apply to access the resource, with applications subject to review and approved data accessed through secure environments.

Under the new contract, Lifebit’s TRE will be deployed within the NIHR BioResource’s AWS cloud tenancy. The environment is designed to allow researchers to analyse sensitive biomedical data without moving the underlying datasets between different locations.

This approach is intended to support controlled access to complex clinical and molecular datasets while maintaining security and governance requirements around research data.

Professor Nathalie Kingston, director of the NIHR BioResource, said: “I am delighted that BioResource will work with Lifebit. What impressed us about Lifebit was its comprehensive expertise across the full spectrum required for a research platform like this — from data and bioinformatics to security, governance and cloud delivery.”

She added that the platform would allow researchers to analyse the BioResource’s datasets and highlighted Lifebit’s previous experience supporting national research platforms.

Building on Cambridge and Genomics England work

The contract builds on Lifebit’s existing work with major biomedical data programmes. The company says it has more than six years of experience delivering Trusted Research Environment infrastructure for Genomics England and has also worked with the University of Cambridge on the CYNAPSE TRE platform for molecular research.

Lifebit’s technology uses a federated approach, allowing data held in different environments to be analysed without requiring the underlying records to be transferred into a central repository. The company has previously described deployments involving organisations including Genomics England, the US National Institutes of Health and Singapore’s national precision medicine programme.

For the NIHR BioResource, the focus will be on providing researchers with a secure environment for analysing its growing collection of clinical and molecular data.

Dr Maria Dunford, CEO of Lifebit, said: “We are proud to support the NIHR BioResource with a platform designed for secure, efficient research on complex clinico-molecular data at scale, while maintaining the governance, control and flexibility required for a nationally significant resource.”

The company also expects the infrastructure to support future connections with other major research cohorts and precision medicine programmes.

Supporting translational research

The new TRE will be used by researchers from both academia and industry working across discovery, translational science and clinical research.

The NIHR BioResource says its secure data environments are intended to provide controlled access to participant data following approval of research applications, with strict access and output controls.

The contract therefore adds another layer of infrastructure around a national resource already used to support research involving large and diverse participant datasets.

As biomedical research increasingly depends on combining genomic, clinical and other forms of health data, secure environments that allow researchers to analyse those datasets without unnecessary data movement are becoming an important part of research infrastructure.