Accelerating Drug Development
Lifebit turns Siloed Clinical Data into Accelerated Drug Development
Building the analytics platform that lets Boehringer Ingelheim derive translational insights from external biobanks — without lifting and shifting petabytes of regulated data.
“The Lifebit Platform is playing an important part of Boehringer Ingelheim’s broader strategy to capture translational disease insights from large external healthcare biobanks and ultimately to accelerate the development of innovative medicines.”
Dr. Jan Nygaard Jensen
SVP & Global Head of Computational Biology & Digital Sciences, Boehringer Ingelheim
Challenges
- Providing secure access to UK Biobank data, in line with UKB governance policies
- Utilising the Five Safes Principles to ensure data security and privacy while allowing user access and analysis
- Standardising UK Biobank and other biobank data to OMOP so they can be queried and analysed jointly
- Organising complex analytical workflows into logical units of work and publishing final results for wider use
- Federating analytics between Genomics England, UK Biobank, and other external sources
Outcomes
- +90% faster target identification and validation analyses
- Federated and joint analyses between UK Biobank, Genomics England, and other biobank data
- Secure access to approved internal clinical data, with data never leaving the federated TRE
- Governance enforced with strict security standards across all researcher interactions with Boehringer Ingelheim’s biobank and clinical trial data
- Enablement of responsible reuse of clinical data to turn insights into discoveries that improve healthcare
impact
59
Minutes vs. months
to complete target identification
500K+
UK Biobank
participant data analysed
125K+
Genomics England
participant data analysed
270+
Analytical processes
built into an end-to-end protocol
FAQs
A federated platform, deployed inside Boehringer’s IT environment
Lifebit’s federated platform was deployed inside Boehringer Ingelheim’s own cloud environment as the analytics and infrastructure layer for translational research. Data sources are connected, not copied; standardisation, curation, and analytics run inside the perimeter at each end.
Here’s what the partnership delivered:
Standardisation across biobanks and internal data
Lifebit harmonises external biobank data with Boehringer’s internal RWE assets to a common model (OMOP-aligned where possible), so a single research question can ask the same thing of every cohort.
Federated connectivity to third parties
The platform federates analytics to data wherever it lives — partner biobanks, regulators, and consortia — rather than centralising into a Boehringer-owned warehouse, keeping data-owner relationships clean.
Outbreak detection on real-world data
Lifebit’s REAL platform underpins Boehringer’s ability to detect transboundary disease signals and emerging pathogens from federated real-world data — an extension of the partnership that began in 2021.
One platform, every programme
Translational, drug-discovery, and precision-medicine teams share a single analytics fabric instead of spinning up dataset-specific environments — one governance review, one platform footprint, every cohort.
Next step
Ready to put your biobanks to work?
Lifebit’s federated platform is deployed inside the world’s leading pharma, government, and population-health programmes. We’d love to show you how.