New supplier contracts awarded

News – 8 March 2022
Our Future Health announces new supplier contracts.

Our Future Health is announcing new supplier contracts that have been awarded.

These contracts will play an important role in helping us to achieve our aim of transforming the prevention, detection and treatment of conditions such as dementia, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke, so future generations can live in good health for longer. 

Genotype assay design and manufacture

The contract for genotype assay design and manufacture has been awarded to Illumina Cambridge Ltd.   

This involves the design, manufacture and quality control assessment for a genotype assay that will be used to process up to 5 million samples donated by volunteers.

Biological sample receipt & processing – Wales

The contract for biological sample receipt & processing for Wales has been awarded to Randox Laboratories.

This involves processing the blood samples for up to 250,000 volunteers. The processing includes blood sample receipting, fraction separation by centrifugation, and DNA extraction.

Genotyping service supplier

The contract for genotyping service supplier had been awarded to Eurofins.

This involves conducting genotype calling, using the assay design by the above supplier. The results of this genotyping will be provided to Our Future Health.

Blood Processing and DNA extraction – England 

The contract for Blood Processing and DNA extraction for England has been awarded to UK Biocentre

This involves processing the blood samples for up to 4.2 million volunteers. The processing includes blood sample receipting, fraction separation by centrifugation, and DNA extraction. 

Long-term ultra-low temperature sample storage (Biobank)

The contract for long-term ultra-low temperature sample storage has been awarded to UK Biocentre

This involves automated, ultra-low temperature, long term storage of up to 45 million cryovials of plasma, buffy coat, and DNA as well as access management of these samples. 

Cloud infrastructure

The contract for cloud infrastructure has been awarded to Microsoft.

This involves providing a secure and scalable public cloud infrastructure to support our programme. The cloud infrastructure will be hosted in the UK and will underpin web sites and apps used by our volunteers, a data store and data processing systems, a trusted research environment (TRE) and associated systems used by researchers.

Trusted Research Environment (TRE) and researcher billing

The contract for our trusted research environment (TRE) and researcher billing has been awarded to DNAnexus.

A TRE enables registered and approved researchers to access and use data within a secure environment to conduct approved research studies. It allows researchers to use a variety of research tools including genomic analysis. DNAnexus will provide this alongside a service to manage the billing of cloud compute and storage costs for researchers using the TRE.

More awards coming soon

We will update this news story as details of the other contracts we have awarded are available.

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