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Announcing the New Aridhia SaaS DRE

The Aridhia Digital Research Environment (DRE) has been delivering services to clinicians, scientists and data scientists for over 10 years. Research Hospitals, Universities and Pharma have worked with the Aridhia platform predominantly in rare diseases, paediatrics, neurodegenerative conditions, various cancer sub-types and across a very long tail of use cases. The DRE has helped join the dots across structured and unstructured biomedical data, solving the all too familiar data silo problem while letting cross-functional teams from across organisations work collaboratively. All of this is happening while managing the diverse range of data use conditions that individual datasets are governed by. The consent of patients and the legal and ethical responsibilities of data controllers have always been top of our list.

Our business model to date has been to provide a single-tenanted DRE (sorry for the jargon) on Azure for each of our customers, typically within a jurisdiction that aligns with their data sovereignty requirements. This model allows a customer to transform how their digital health programs scale across their institution and how they collaborate externally with their partners while understanding everything that’s happened during the lifecycle of a project for governance and reproducibility. The DRE provides extensive and seamless integration with other enterprise platforms and data repositories.

As one example, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London adopted the DRE seven years ago and currently runs in excess of 400 Research and Clinical Workspaces (or projects) through the GOSH DRE. GOSH is one of the most advanced and digitally mature research hospitals in Europe and the availability of the DRE, their expertise, and their data assets are significant contributors to their ranking.

Over the past few years, we’ve had multiple requests from research and clinical teams to subscribe ‘to a slice’ of the DRE to run their project. Typically, their ambition to innovate scientifically or clinically isn’t matched by the IT services on offer from their institution and/or they want to collaborate widely across multiple organisations, and somebody has to act as the ‘neutral Switzerland’ as a space for data, people, and code to reside and work together safely and securely.

Projects funded by public and private funds typically fall into this space and we’ve worked with a very wide range of those funders over the years – Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK, Horizon Europe, FDA, National Institute of Health, and IHI Europe have directly or indirectly put their faith in our platform to enable trusted data sharing and collaboration and to make significant research or patient benefits happen.

The SaaS DRE

So, with all of that we’re pleased to announce that we’re making available a slightly different take on the same DRE platform, the Aridhia SaaS DRE, a PAYG SaaS service for research teams with a project, data, and people that want to work together safely and securely (and quickly!). The SaaS DRE takes the most commonly used features and functions from the Enterprise DRE and packages them into a managed-service subscription model. Data governance, security, and data residency remain as important as ever and so we’re launching with the UK and Australia available today, Germany, Netherlands and Canada next month and the United States in June. We’ll introduce additional data sovereign hubs in other parts of the world as the year goes on.

Users can sign up and start work quickly, paying a monthly charge that provides dedicated Workspaces for teams to work collaboratively on authorised datasets and FAIR Data Services to discover data, request access, and build data assets over time.

Users of the Premium service can publish their metadata or data (if open) to the Aridhia Network allowing open discovery of metadata throughout the world either by search, URL, or DOI. Everyone should be building and improving not just their data but all the artefacts that accompany the data (scripts, papers, code, apps) and make the dataset more usable and more useful. Funders look for a home for results and for those results to be discoverable. This should be a valuable service to ensure sustainability of your project, something that you or others (with permissions) can build upon.

Our message is pretty simple. You don’t need to build it. You don’t need to wait for it. You just need to start. Try the SaaS DRE and spend your energy on your science, not your infrastructure.