Overview of the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform (UKB‑RAP)

The UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform (UKB-RAP) is a compliant, restricted, cloud-based environment that enables approved researchers to work directly with UK Biobank data at scale. Hosted on the DNAnexus platform, UKB-RAP eliminates the need to move sensitive data outside of controlled environments, allowing you to focus on discovery rather than infrastructure.

As a registered user, you can import your own datasets into UKB-RAP to support your approved research projects. There are no restrictions on data type or size, giving you the flexibility to integrate genomics, imaging, clinical, and real-world data in one place. All data use is governed by UK Biobank’s Material Transfer Agreement and platform terms to ensure responsible and ethical research practices.

UK Biobank and DNAnexus jointly operate UKB-RAP with security and privacy as foundational principles. By centralising analysis in a highly controlled cloud environment, researchers benefit from built-in protections that reduce the risk of data breaches, support regulatory compliance, and enable efficient collaboration across institutions.

DNAnexus provides the underlying infrastructure and security controls that make this possible, including:

• Enterprise-grade physical data centre security
• Highly reliable, replicated data storage
• Encryption of all data at rest and in transit
• Fine-grained, user-controlled permissions for data, tools, and workflow sharing

For transparency and reproducibility, the platform maintains comprehensive audit logs for six years and supports versioned, reproducible workflows, helping ensure your analyses can be validated, shared, and extended by collaborators. UKB-RAP also aligns with major regulatory and data protection frameworks, including HIPAA, CLIA, Annex 11, and data privacy regulations for the UK and European Economic Area.

Perhaps most critically, your intellectual property is safe and restricted. Your data and pipelines are not visible to UK Biobank or DNAnexus. Data is encrypted both in-transit (DIT) and at-rest (DAR). Data uploaded or generated on RAP can only be viewed by the RAP user. The RAP user may share their data and pipelines by explicitly sharing (collaborating) with other approved RAP users as part of their scientific collaboration. In rare cases where a RAP user needs RAP Support to view the user's data or pipelines, the user may share access to the data or pipelines with RAP Support for the purpose of solving the user’s issue. Should the user forget to rescind this share, RAP Support automatically releases this share within seven (7) days of the support ticket being closed.

In summary, UKB-RAP provides researchers with a trusted, scalable environment for high-impact biomedical research. Through its partnership with DNAnexus, UK Biobank ensures that security, compliance, and reproducibility are built into the platform, so you can spend less time managing infrastructure and more time advancing science.