Lifebit Awarded Three-Year Contract to Provide the Trusted Research Environment for the NIHR BioResource

Lifebit will deploy its fully federated Trusted Research Environment natively within the NIHR BioResource’s AWS cloud tenancy — keeping data in place for secure, large-scale research across common and rare diseases.

The UK’s NIHR BioResource is one of the country’s most valuable translational research assets — deeply consented data from more than 350,000 adult and child volunteers, spanning both common and rare diseases. Its scientific value depends on getting that richly characterised data into researchers’ hands securely, without the data ever being moved or duplicated. That is exactly the problem a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) is built to solve — and today’s news puts one at the heart of a nationally significant resource.

London, United Kingdom — 17 September 2026 — Lifebit, a leading provider of secure biomedical data platforms and Trusted Research Environments (TREs), today announced that it has been awarded a three-year contract by the University of Cambridge to provide the Trusted Research Environment for the NIHR BioResource. The award is made by the University of Cambridge on behalf of the NIHR BioResource.

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) BioResource is one of the UK’s most important national assets for translational research, enabling researchers to work with deeply consented participant data and rich clinical and molecular datasets. With a large national footprint and a broad participant base, it plays a critical role in accelerating discovery across common and rare diseases — helping researchers identify relevant cohorts, advance biological understanding, and support the development of more precise approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

A federated TRE, deployed natively in the cloud

By deploying Lifebit’s TRE natively within the NIHR BioResource’s AWS cloud tenancy, the programme adopts a fully federated enterprise platform that keeps data in place — eliminating transfer and duplication — while delivering security-by-design aligned to the Five Safes Framework. Security controls are inherent to the platform: end-to-end encryption (at rest, in transit, and during analysis), granular access controls, continuous security posture management, system health observability, Security Tower, and Lifebit’s AI-Automated Airlock and Airlock Tower for governed, fully auditable data egress. Together these combine a battle-tested user experience with the scalability needed for large-scale analytics and cost-efficient execution at enterprise scale.

Built on a proven track record

The award builds on Lifebit’s track record of delivering secure research infrastructure for some of the world’s most important data initiatives. Lifebit has more than six years of TRE delivery with Genomics England, and a long-running relationship with the University of Cambridge — providing the CYNAPSE TRE platform for molecular research groups working with sensitive genomic and clinical data, now in its fifth year.

A platform built for a national resource

“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 clinico-molecular data and bioinformatics to security, governance and cloud delivery. The Lifebit platform will allow researchers to mine and analyse our richly characterised dataset to further transform translational research. Lifebit’s experience supporting other key national platforms, such as Genomics England, was also highly relevant and gave us confidence in their ability to deliver for a resource of this importance,” said Professor Nathalie Kingston, Director of the NIHR BioResource.

“This award reflects Lifebit’s proven experience delivering trusted research infrastructure for leading organisations, including Genomics England, NIH-NLM, Singapore’s TRUST platform and Boehringer Ingelheim. 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. Just as importantly, it opens the door to future federation between the NIHR BioResource and other major cohorts, including Genomics England in the UK and the national precision medicine programmes Lifebit supports internationally — from Singapore to Israel to Canada and the US,” said Dr Maria Dunford, Chief Executive Officer of Lifebit.

Looking ahead

The platform will help the NIHR BioResource continue to support a broad community of researchers from industry and academia — working across discovery, translational science and clinical research — while strengthening the infrastructure needed to deliver secure and efficient research at national scale. As demand grows for federated, cloud-based trusted research environment infrastructure across the UK life sciences ecosystem, the partnership marks a further step in enabling world-class biomedical research through secure, scalable and interoperable data environments.

About Lifebit

Lifebit is the global leader in federated, secure, and AI-powered health data intelligence platforms and trusted research environments. It helps governments, health systems, and biopharma organisations unify, govern, and unlock biomedical data for real-world research, clinical impact, and life-saving discovery and decisions.

The Lifebit Platform is trusted by the largest number of governments and leading commercial organisations to securely manage and analyse over 275 million patient records across 30+ countries — including the USA’s NIH, UK’s Genomics England, Singapore’s Ministry of Health, Boehringer Ingelheim, United Health Group, FlatIron Health and 23andMe, among others.

With operations across the U.S., Canada, UK, Singapore, Japan and Australia, Lifebit powers national precision medicine programmes, enterprise data infrastructures, and AI-driven research initiatives worldwide.

About the NIHR BioResource

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) BioResource is a unique resource for studying disease mechanisms and investigating the links between genes, the environment, health and disease, enabling scientific discoveries and facilitating translational medicine for the benefit of patients.

More than 350,000 adult and child volunteers, with and without health conditions, have donated a biological sample, shared health and lifestyle information, and given consent to participate in research. Researchers can apply for access to participant data, samples, and the opportunity to recall by genotype and/or phenotype to help deliver research studies into a wide range of common and rare diseases.

Learn more at lifebit.ai

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