Lifebit awarded 3-year NIHR BioResource TRE contract

London, UK — Sept 17, 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 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.

By deploying Lifebit’s TRE natively within the NIHR BioResource’s AWS cloud tenancy, the programme adopts the most advanced, fully federated enterprise platform in the market that keeps data in place to eliminate transfer and duplication while delivering the highest standard of security-by-design aligned to the Five Safes Framework. All security controls are inherent to Lifebit’s platform, including end-to-end encryption (at rest, in transit, and during analysis), the most granular access controls, continuous security posture management, system health observability, Security Tower, and the industry’s most mature AI-Automated Airlock and Airlock Tower for governed, fully auditable data egress. This is combined with the most battle-tested user experience, the highest scalability for large-scale analytics, and the most cost-efficient execution at enterprise scale.

This award builds on Lifebit’s proven 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.

Professor Nathalie Kingston, Director, 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. 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.”

Dr Maria Dunford, CEO, Lifebit, said: “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 US.”

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, this partnership marks a further step in enabling world-class biomedical research through secure, scalable and interoperable data environments.

About Lifebit

Lifebit provides secure, cloud-native technology that enables organisations to unify, govern and analyse biomedical data at scale. Its Trusted Research Environment platform supports leading public and private sector organisations to accelerate discovery while maintaining the highest standards of security, compliance and data governance.

About 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.