Flatiron Health and Lifebit Biotech are expanding their collaboration into Japan to transform cancer care, facilitating ground breaking research by allowing for safe and secure access to real-world data (RWD).

Building on the success of their multi-year strategic partnership, Lifebit’s pioneering federated Trusted Research Environment (TRE) technology will enable safe and secure access to Flatiron Health’s high-quality oncology RWD. Researchers with approved access to this RWD are able to safely utilise such data to power vital research, without removing data from the TRE.

Flatiron Health’s EHR-derived high quality RWD available in Japan, specifically the Japan gastric cancer, colorectal cancer and breast cancer datasets, have been securely accessed and are starting to be used for oncology research via Flatiron’s TRE, powered by Lifebit’s technology.

Lifebit’s TRE technology provides Flatiron Health with a highly secure and controlled computing environment that is designed to protect the privacy and security of sensitive data. It supports the most stringent levels of data governance by removing the need for data to be moved. Data instead remains in Flatiron’s secure environment and is analysed in situ by authorised researchers.

In addition to protecting data privacy, TREs are a solution to advancing health research and insights through connection to large-scale, diverse and distributed data that are stored in separate locations across the world. Studying larger samples of diverse health data is known to increase findings and speed up scientific discoveries, leading to a greater understanding of how to detect, prevent, and treat diseases such as cancer. Further, Flatiron’s TREs offer the ability to pool Flatiron RWD from different regions, allowing for further exploration of the transportability of evidence across markets.