Joining the TREvolution – Aridhia, DARE UK and Data Federation in Trusted Research Environments

Ross recently delivered the closing keynote speech the DataSHIELD annual conference, the main theme of the talk was the integration of data federation frameworks with Trusted Research Environments (TRE) and the potential benefits of this approach. This blog post details Aridhia’s involvement in a new DARE UK project to drive this work forward.

DARE and the DRE:

We have previously used or investigated existing DARE standards and products. Aridhia was the first commercial TRE provider to score its product against the DARE developed SATRE specification, and we recently blogged about the deployment of the DARE developed output checker SACRO to DRE workspaces. So when DARE approached us about joining the TREvolution project we were keen to hear what they were proposing.

What is TREvolution?

TREvolution is:

One of the pillars of the project is enabling federation between TREs, and our involvement in this part of the project was what they were proposing, specifically using the GA4GH Task Execution Service (TES) as a common standard for running federated tasks inside trusted research environments.

TES, the Common API and the Federated Node:

There are two things that make Aridhia a suitable partner for this project. First and most obviously we are a TRE provider that openly adheres to the DARE SATRE specification, and secondly we have a data federation project which is based on the TES standard.

The DataSHIELD speech sketched out the companies history of involvement in data federation projects. This originated with the ICODA project and ran through to our current work on PHEMS. ICODA produced an open standard for a federated data sharing API, the Common API which incorporates TES into its design. In PHEMS we have taken this standard and developed it into a deployable software package, the Federated Node.

Proving the concept:

Federated Nodes need to be deployed with:

• A database holding the federated data
• An Azure Container Registry (ACR) which holds the approved analytical code.

The first part of this work will be to prove that standard DRE workspace infrastructure can provide these services:

• Use of a DRE workspace database as the data source for a federated node
• Use of a DRE hub ACR as the source of analytical code

This still needs to be tested, but we are confident that it will work. If that proves to be the case then in principle it will be possible to use an Aridhia workspace as pop up federated infrastructure. Given that one of the known blockers to joining federated networks is timely provision of appropriate infrastructure, this alone would represent a substantial step forward.

What Next?

If as expected we are able to deploy the FN with the DRE as described above, our next consideration will be how to make it possible for users to self-serve this set up, or at least how they can do it with the minimum amount of support from our service desk and enablement teams.

We will be providing an interim report to DARE UK on our progress at the start of December, and will provide a further public update at that point.