Charnwood Campus is pleased to announce a growing collaboration with Eastern England SDE, reinforcing its commitment to accelerating innovation in life sciences, healthcare, and data-driven research.
Following a recent meeting with Gosia Khrais, Director of Charnwood Campus, both organisations have identified strong alignment in their mission to remove barriers to research and enable faster, more effective collaboration across the health ecosystem.
A key focus of this partnership is supporting awareness and engagement with the Eastern England Secure Data Environment (SDE), an initiative hosted by Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust in partnership with Health Innovation East and Cambridge University Health Partners. The SDE is addressing one of the most significant challenges in research today: secure and timely access to high-quality clinical data.
Through a single governance route, researchers can apply once to access data from multiple NHS sites. The platform enables on-demand data access—rather than relying on a traditional data lake—ensuring datasets are secure, relevant, and up to date. Available data includes secondary prescribing data, diagnostics, laboratory results, and longitudinal health records that are not readily accessible elsewhere.
The SDE also significantly reduces research timelines, with rapid cohort discovery cutting feasibility assessments from months to hours. By providing standardised longitudinal data across multiple NHS sites, the platform reduces both the cost and complexity of multi-site studies. In addition, it supports a wide range of innovation activities, including AI model testing, medical device feasibility studies, and secure collaboration using proprietary datasets.
This collaboration reflects Charnwood Campus’ ongoing role as a convening hub for innovation, bringing together partners across industry, academia, and the NHS to accelerate the translation of research into real-world impact.
“For too long research has stalled because of the fragmentation and lack of suitably secure spaces to access and analyse data at scale, meaning patients miss out on discoveries that could improve their lives. By bringing together the expertise across the East of England and East Midlands regions, we’re creating a unique regional asset for research, clinical trials and life sciences innovation. Our focus now is to expand this capability so that more patients and more organisations can benefit from the research it enables.”
Mark Avery, Director of the Eastern England SDE
To learn more about the Eastern England Secure Data Environment, visit:
Home – Eastern England SDE
And watch: Unlocking NHS Data for Research and Trials