Federating Oncology Data
Lifebit turns Distributed Cancer Data into Federated Global Insights
Helping Flatiron’s UK clinical team turn longitudinal oncology data into research-ready evidence — without ever exporting patient-level records.
“The advanced capabilities of Lifebit’s Trusted Research Environment, coupled with our focus to reimagine the infrastructure of cancer care, are enabling us to unlock the potential of cancer data.”
Dr. Arun Sujenthiran
UK Clinical Lead and Senior Medical Director, Flatiron Health
Challenges
- Secure, governed analysis across distributed oncology datasets, ensuring compliance with regional data regulations without requiring data centralisation
- Scalable data processing and ingestion, reducing the operational burden of reprocessing and validating data through automated pipelines and efficient data refreshes
- Federated orchestration across jurisdictions, enabling coordinated updates and analyses across region-specific datasets without moving data
Outcomes
- Federated data discovery, querying, and analysis across multiple countries
- Secure TRE enabling analysis of sensitive patient-level data without moving data across borders, ensuring strict privacy controls and compliance with national regulations
- Improved collaboration across distributed research teams
- Frequent data ingestion enables faster insights than traditional registries
impact
5M+
30+
Partners
across US, UK, Germany and Japan
100%
Federation
across US, UK, Germany and Japan
90
Day-cycle
for data refreshes
FAQs
A federated TRE that fits clinical oncology workflows
Lifebit’s federated TRE underpins Flatiron’s UK oncology research programme. Approved researchers connect into the environment, run their analyses against Flatiron’s longitudinal dataset, and export only disclosure-controlled aggregate results.
What the partnership delivers:
Audit-grade governance for oncology data
Project approvals, data-use agreements, researcher accreditation, and full activity audit logs all live on the same control plane — aligned with NHS information governance expectations.
Compute-to-data, not data-to-compute
Researchers analyse Flatiron’s UK dataset where it lives. Patient-level records never enter a researcher’s laptop, cloud account, or institutional environment.
Airlock-mediated outputs
Aggregate statistics, cohort summaries, and model coefficients leave the environment through an automated review process. Patient-level identifiers do not.
Familiar oncology toolset
Jupyter, RStudio, and standard biostatistics packages run within the environment, so oncologists and statisticians use the tools they already know on protected data.
Next step
Ready to make your oncology data research-ready?
Lifebit’s federated TRE is the analytics layer behind real-world oncology, national genomics, and biobank-scale research programmes worldwide.