Model-agnostic platform enables researchers to build and deploy custom AI scientist agents within Federated Trusted Research Environments

London, UK — Lifebit, a leading provider of secure biomedical data platforms and Trusted Research Environments (TREs), has announced the launch of AI Scientist Studio at HumanX Amsterdam. The new platform enables researchers to build and deploy custom AI scientist agents within secure Federated TREs, allowing organizations to use frontier AI models on governed health data while ensuring data never leaves the source. Rather than requiring researchers to transfer data into external AI environments, Lifebit brings AI to the data, enabling analysis to take place where governed datasets already reside.

“AI Scientist tools are here, and they are the future of health data analysis, but the world’s most important health data still cannot use them”, said Dr Maria Dunford, CEO of Lifebit. “Researchers are constrained by pre-built tools, while existing AI Scientists require sensitive data to move outside governed environments. AI Scientist Studio changes this by bringing any AI model to the data, enabling researchers to build their own AI Scientists and run them securely, in a federated manner, across health and genomic data without compromising control, sovereignty or oversight.”

AI scientist platforms are proliferating, but the world’s most valuable health data remains largely out of reach. National health systems, biobanks and pharmaceutical companies operate under strict privacy and governance requirements that prevent patient-level data from moving to third-party AI Scientist tools. Researchers are also constrained by pre-built tools they cannot easily adapt or replace. AI Scientist Studio removes both barriers: researchers can build their own best-in-class AI Scientists and bring the AI to the data—not the data to the AI.

Built on Lifebit’s Federated TRE architecture, AI Scientist Studio applies the Five Safes framework to agentic AI. Researchers can bring their own or choose any foundation model, scientific tool and knowledge base, then build specialist agents for cohort discovery, deep phenotyping, analysis and evidence generation. Agents execute on compute inside each data custodian’s governed environment, inheriting user permissions and operating federated across sites. Patient-level data never moves; chat history, outputs and complete audit trails remain within the environment, and only approved results leave through Lifebit’s Airlock controls.

“As governments, health systems and life sciences organizations adopt frontier AI, they increasingly face the challenge of doing so without surrendering sovereignty over sensitive data and infrastructure,” added Dr Dunford. “Major AI vendors have made significant moves into scientific research this year, but the prevailing model still assumes that data comes to the AI. Lifebit is inverting that model, bringing frontier AI directly to sensitive health and genomic data.”

Dr Maria Dunford, CEO of Lifebit, will be discussing AI Scientist Studio at HumanX Amsterdam between 22-24 September, exploring the growing role of AI scientist agents in biomedical research and how organizations can apply frontier AI within governed health-data environments.

AI Scientist Studio builds on Lifebit’s existing federated secure infrastructure, which is already used by organizations including UK’s Genomics England, UK’s NIHR BioResource, Canada’s Canpath, Singapore’s Ministry of Health and Boehringer Ingelheim, among others. Lifebit’s platform supports the secure management and analysis of more than 275 million patient records across 30+ countries, providing a distributed foundation for governments, health systems, biobanks and life sciences organizations to apply advanced AI to sensitive biomedical data at scale.

About Lifebit

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

Suggested caption: Lifebit AI Scientist Studio enables researchers to bring frontier AI models to governed health data within secure, federated Trusted Research Environments, without moving the underlying data.