Our Future Health’s trusted research environment will collect information from millions of volunteers and provide tools to transform the prevention, detection, and treatment of diseases

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — DNAnexus, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based genomic and biomedical data access and companion analysis software, today announced that it has been awarded a three-year contract by Our Future Health. The DNAnexus platform, which will be hosted in the UK, will provide approved researchers with a scalable, cloud-based trusted research environment for accessing and analyzing Our Future Health’s growing biomedical dataset and tools to drive biological insights and global collaborations to advance precision medicine.

Our Future Health is an ambitious collaboration among the public, private, and non-profit sectors designed to help scientists develop new ways to prevent, detect, and treat disease. The program aims to recruit up to 5 million adult volunteers, which is more than 9% of the adult population in the UK. Approved researchers from the global life sciences, healthcare, and academic communities will be able to use the DNAnexus platform to securely explore and analyze the de-identified data.

Andrew Roddam, CEO of Our Future Health, said: “We’re delighted that DNAnexus will be delivering our trusted research environment. It’s an incredibly important decision because providing an environment for researchers to work with participants’ data in a safe, secure, and controlled way is a top priority for Our Future Health. DNAnexus will be a really important partner as we work towards achieving our goal to help researchers develop new ways to prevent, detect, and treat diseases.”

Today, DNAnexus has more than 12,000 platform users across 48 countries and counts seven of the top 10 pharmaceutical and eight of the top 10 diagnostic companies as customers. The company built and continues to support the Research Analysis Platform for the UK Biobank, another large-scale biomedical resource that contains in-depth genetic and health information from half a million UK participants. The protected cloud environment was designed to meet the most rigorous standards for data quality, scalability, security, privacy, and safety.

“Our Future Health will be a huge step forward for genomic-based science in the UK and around the world. We are very excited that this ambitious health research program, the largest of its kind, will utilize the power of our industry-leading biomedical data analysis platform and expertise,” said Richard Daly, CEO at DNAnexus. “Together with Our Future Health and the UK Biobank, we are proud to be the partner of choice for transformative population research programs, and we look forward to empowering more researchers to accelerate the era of precision medicine.”

About Our Future Health
Our Future Health is a collaboration between the public, private and charity sectors. It aims to be the UK’s largest health research programme, bringing people together to develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat disease.

Our Future Health is committed to the highest standards, policies and processes that protect participants’ confidentiality, whilst maximising the opportunity to help researchers to tackle serious diseases. Participants’ data will be de-identified and held securely in trusted research environments that meet strict security criteria. There will be a robust and transparent access process to ensure appropriate research access to Our Future Health data and samples for registered researchers. All researchers – whether employed by universities, government, the NHS, charities or companies – will be held to the same standards.

Our Future Health is a member of the UK Health Data Research Alliance, the independent alliance of leading healthcare and research organisations establishing best practice for the ethical use of UK health data for research at scale.

Our Future Health is a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (number 12212468) and a charity registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales (charity number 1189681) and OSCR, Scottish Charity Regulator (charity number SC050917).

Learn more at www.ourfuturehealth.org.uk.

About DNAnexus
To improve human health, researchers and clinicians need to access complex and sensitive biomedical data and innovative technologies that can enable novel insights. However, these data are often incompatible or difficult to process. DNAnexus is the leading bioinformatics company that facilitates secure access and utilization of biomedical data while supporting collaboration across internal and external teams. The end-to-end integrated diagnostic R&D and production bioinformatics platform enables national biobank biomedical initiatives to provide pharmaceutical companies with a multi-omics data science platform for new target drug discovery, DNAnexus empowers the healthcare and life sciences industry to transform how they leverage biomedical data to accelerate scientific discoveries and deliver better patient care. For more information on DNAnexus, please visit www.dnanexus.com or follow the company @DNAnexus.