Vivek Iyer, Wellcome Sanger Institute

Genes & Health (G&H) project is a large (c 50,000 donors) population-based cohort of British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. The project’s goal is to investigate the genetic contribution to common diseases in this community, and to identify rare homozygous gene knockouts and their consequences. This involves jointly analysing genetic data and electronic health record data inside a certified TRE. The project is a collaboration between QMUL, KCL, WSI and a consortium of pharma partners. The G&H TRE is provisioned and administered by us (WSI) entirely in a Google cloud environment built solely for this project. It allows separated bubbles of scientists from different organisations to work securely with virtual desktops on sensitive data, whilst still being able to share selected data between bubbles. The TRE also allows users to run High Performance Compute (HPC) within their secure bubbles. I will sketch why the project chose this TRE, its architecture, the way it’s used, and how we are approaching certification. (Note: The codebase was licensed from U Helsinki and written by Solita for the Finngen project.)