Case Study: The Francis Crick Institute achieves rapid, secure TREs and major cost savings with Snowflake

The Francis Crick Institute Powers Exploratory Research With Snowflake

The Francis Crick Institute in London — Europe’s largest discovery life sciences research centre with over 100 research groups and 2,000+ staff — needed a fast, secure way to unite sensitive patient data for cross‑border collaboration. Trusted Research Environments (TREs) were essential to comply with data protection and provide traceability, but traditional TREs took months or years and cost millions, creating a major IT bottleneck for ambitious, multi‑partner studies.

Working with Infinite Lambda, The Crick built Trellis on Snowflake’s Data Cloud in six months, delivering access controls, billing, reporting, data sharing and Python analytics out of the box. The new architecture cuts TRE setup to about 30 minutes, was implemented for under £200k, lowers barriers with PAYGO pricing, and has already enabled international projects — turning IT from a constraint into an enabler of faster, more ambitious research.

The Francis Crick Institute