DARE UK Research Exemplars

DARE UK Research Exemplars are short, impactful data research projects applying and evaluating emerging Trusted Research Environment (TRE) capabilities within real-world studies.

With £3.44 million in funding from the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Fund, DARE UK is supporting eight research projects that will demonstrate how advanced tools and technologies can enable complex research across multiple UK TREs while preserving privacy, governance and public trust.

The projects focus on applying innovations emerging from TREvolution and tested by the DARE UK Early Adopters, including data federation, federated analytics pipelines, enhanced disclosure control tools, and scalable computing infrastructure for advanced data analysis and artificial intelligence. By embedding these innovations within real research studies, the projects will generate practical evidence on how new TRE capabilities work in practice, identifying both opportunities and challenges for the future development of secure data research infrastructures in the UK.

The research portfolio spans a range of domains, including population health, neurological conditions, maternal health, environmental inequalities, dermatology, and AI-driven medical analysis. Several projects will also explore how sensitive data research can be securely connected to advanced computing resources and how trained AI models can be safely released from TREs.

Public Involvement and Engagement is embedded across all projects, ensuring that patients, communities and members of the public contribute to discussions around governance, transparency and acceptable uses of sensitive data. These contributions help ensure that new research capabilities are developed in ways that are trustworthy and aligned with public expectations.