Managing Trusted Research Environments

Manage Trusted Research Environments (TREs) on the DNAnexus Platform: create environments, configure data inventories, manage access review pipelines, and control the TRE lifecycle.

Apollo and Trusted Research Environments licenses are required to use Trusted Research Environments on the DNAnexus Platform. Contact DNAnexus Sales for more information.

A Trusted Research Environment (TRE) is a secure, configuration-driven framework for sharing sensitive biomedical data. It enables data providers to organize, manage, and share data with authorized researchers while maintaining full ownership and control.

As a TRE Admin, you manage the full lifecycle of secure environments — from initial setup to ongoing maintenance and data releases. This includes configuring data governance policies, organizing versioned data resource inventories, and managing multi-step access review workflows. For the researcher and reviewer perspectives, see Explore Trusted Research Environments.

Setting Up a New TRE

Setting up a new TRE is a sequential process. Start with planning your research environment to make the decisions that are hardest to change later:

• How many review steps your governance pipeline needs and who reviews each step

• Which data access restrictions to enforce on researcher projects

You also need to prepare the inventory assets required for your data offering. Every TRE needs a File Inventory TSV and Data Collections JSON. You can also provide an optional Data Showcase for showcase data exploration and cohort selection, plus optional Tabular Data or Assay Data for phenotypic, clinical, and genomic full datasets. Contact DNAnexus Professional Services for guidance on preparing these assets.

TRE visibility — whether to restrict access to a defined list of authorized users or make the environment publicly discoverable to all users on the DNAnexus Platform — can be configured during initial setup or adjusted at any time after publishing.

Once your inventory assets are ready and your decisions are made, you can create and publish the environment.

Configuring an Active TRE

After publishing, you can continue adjusting the TRE configuration:

• Control who can discover and access the environment by managing TRE membership.

• Add or remove individual reviewers from existing review steps by configuring reviewers.

• Set and adjust the restrictions enforced on all researcher projects using data access policies, which work similarly to project data access controls.

Lifecycle Operations

A TRE moves through three states that determine what configuration is possible at each stage.

In the Draft state, you have full configuration access: TRE details, membership, resource inventory, data access policies, and review steps. Once you publish to the Active state, the resource inventory structure and review pipeline lock. You can still update membership, adjust policies, and manage reviewers within existing steps.

When you need to update the inventory to a new data version, transition to the Maintenance state. The TRE remains visible to researchers but is marked as under maintenance, and new access requests are suspended. Once the updated inventory is ready, reactivating returns the TRE to the Active state.

For all state transition procedures, see managing TRE lifecycle states.