The Danish National Genome Center Partners with Lifebit to Deliver Nationwide Personalised Medicine

London, UK - 28 April 2022 – Lifebit, whose leading technology enables secure analysis over sensitive datasets for researchers and interconnects such large patient cohorts worldwide, today announces a long-term partnership with the Danish National Genome Center (NGC). Lifebit will deploy Lifebit CloudOS to create a Federated Trusted Research Environment within the Danish NGC’s supercomputing cluster to serve as the scalable and secure data management and analysis platform for Denmark’s national researchers, clinical scientists and international collaborators.

The Danish NGC, a government agency and authority within the Danish Healthcare system, was created to implement the Danish Government’s National Personalised Medicine Strategy. The core vision of the NGC is to develop more precise diagnosis, targeted treatment and strengthen research within the Danish healthcare system. During the first phase of the strategy, the Danish National Genome Center and its collaborators will recruit and sequence whole genomes of 60,000 patients diagnosed with cancer, autoimmune disorders and rare diseases by 2024.

The platform will deliver a next-generation computational infrastructure within Denmark's on-premise supercomputing center, allowing the NGC to meet its vision of establishing and operating a state-of-the-art national infrastructure for personalised medicine while keeping the data at all times in the secure national infrastructure. Only Lifebit with both its genomic data expertise as well as its internationally proven ability of managing such complex Government environments through its patented operating system Lifebit CloudOS was deemed capable to deliver this project.

The platform will thus enable researchers with secure access, querying and analysis of this sensitive clinico-genomic data in a fully scalable and flexible way; also allowing for them to collaborate at a global scale.

Federation will play a crucial role in enabling the future possibility to collaborate with international partners such as Genomics England, France Genomique, Genomic Medicine Sweden and other biobanks from around the world. Virtually connecting these sensitive datasets, enabling joint analysis that is however performed in situ without moving data, can lead to exponentially higher research findings. In some cases, it can be observed that increasing the number of patients in a study by 10x led to ~100x the number of scientific findings and genomic associations making clear how important real connectivity of these datasets is.

“Lifebit continues to guide and power the world’s largest national and private precision medicine programmes. We are extremely proud to be delivering this flagship programme for the nation of Denmark. This Federated Trusted Research Environment will enable researchers to more effectively collaborate over this rich dataset at scale and drive international collaboration between other government initiatives - many of which already leverage Lifebit’s federated technology.” Thorben Seeger, Chief Business Development Officer at Lifebit

Other examples of Lifebit’s data platform at work include Genomics England, NIHR Cambridge and the Hong Kong Genome Institute.

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