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Aridhia DRE Powering the AD Workbench Ecosystem

Recently, the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative published this open paper on how the AD Workbench transforms Alzheimer’s research, providing unprecedented access to data via an extensive partner network and the ability to collaborate on that data in secure Workspaces. You can read the full paper here:

AD Workbench: Transforming Alzheimer’s research with secure, global, and collaborative data sharing and analysis.

Authors: Caitlin P. McHugh, Matthew H. S. Clement, Mukta Phatak

The AD Workbench

At Aridhia, we’ve very proud that our managed service DRE platform serves as the backbone of the AD Workbench, providing a robust, secure, and collaborative environment that empowers researchers to advance Alzheimer’s disease research through efficient data sharing and analysis.

As referenced throughout the paper, here are some of the key ways in which the Aridhia DRE powers the AD Workbench and Ecosystem:

Secure, Audited Research Workspaces

The Aridhia DRE offers secure, cloud-based analytical workspaces where researchers can collaborate in real-time. Workspaces support various analytical tools, including Jupyter Notebooks and RStudio, allowing users to work in their preferred programming languages. Each research project operates within a private sandbox environment, ensuring data security and compliance with privacy regulations. 

FAIR Data Services for Enhanced Discoverability

FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Data Services, provides a comprehensive data catalogue. This facilitates the discovery and access of diverse datasets, building custom cohorts of interest, and promoting transparency and reproducibility in research with a fully audited and traceable record of data provenance and user access.

Rapid Data Access and Onboarding

The DRE streamlines the data access process through automated governance workflows that makes it easy to request access to data and track the status of requests. Orchestration by FAIR Data Services reduces the time from access request to workspace provisioning to less than one working day. This efficiency accelerates research timelines and fosters timely scientific discoveries.

Integration of Specialised Analytical Tools

Containerised applications (e.g., Docker), R Shiny apps, and Virtual Machines are available for researchers to deploy their own tools, advanced analysis pipelines, and make use of community apps such as Roche’s NeuroToolKit (NTK). These tools enhance data curation and analysis capabilities, providing researchers with advanced functionalities tailored to Alzheimer’s research.

Scalable and Cost-Effective Computing Resources

The Aridhia DRE’s Azure cloud-based architecture allows for dynamic allocation of computing resources, ensuring that researchers have access to the necessary computational power without incurring excessive costs. This scalability supports a wide range of analytical tasks, from basic data exploration to complex machine learning models. Platform administrators can easily track and manage this usage over time using platform metrics APIs and dashboards.

Extensive Service Desk Support

Our Service Desk address extensive volumes of requests from Workbench Users, Data Partners and Integrators, providing support for data access, onboarding, compute access and advanced configurations required to support large scale collaboration projects with a complex ecosystem of contributors and partners.


These capabilities – the combination of best-in-class platform features and managed service support, powers the AD Workbench and supports hundreds of active projects and thousands of researchers across the globe. At Aridhia, we ensure that the ADWB continues to provide a next-gen transformative research platform at scale.