On 5–6 February 2026, the HEREDITARY consortium gathered at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL), Portugal, for its 5th Plenary Meeting and the first in-person meeting of the project’s third year. Over two intensive days, partners reviewed progress, aligned on strategic priorities, and advanced key technical developments that will shape the next phase of the project.
The meeting followed directly after the Federated Learning Workshop (3–4 February), creating strong momentum around HEREDITARY’s core mission: enabling privacy-preserving, multimodal data analysis across European medical centres.
Opening the meeting, Project Coordinator Gianmaria Silvello (UNIPD) provided a comprehensive overview of the project’s current status. With the first review completed and 41 Deliverables successfully delivered, the consortium is now fully focused on addressing reviewers’ recommendations and consolidating technical achievements into high-impact results.
Throughout the first day, each Work Package presented its latest developments and next steps, demonstrating strong cross-WP integration and alignment with the project’s strategic objectives. The review of ongoing activities confirmed steady technical progress across data infrastructure, semantic integration, analytics, visualization, legal frameworkandcitizen science, which reinforces the coordination between clinical, technical, social and legal dimensions.
A central highlight of the meeting was the Federated Learning and Federated Analytics sessions. On the second day, SURF reported on the Federated Learning workshop and the evolution of infrastructure leadership. Discussions explored the idea of creating a living document to guide institutions in setting up secure federated learning environments. On the Federated Analytics side, the Hereditary Data Network (HDN) architecture and deployment roadmap were presented by UNIPD, ensuring a real HDN query system running by December 2026, with a clear maintenance plan, and preparing a demonstrator for reviewers in early 2027. These developments mark a decisive step towards operational federated workflow execution across heterogeneous clinical and genomic datasets.
After this, the five HEREDITARY use cases were reviewed in detail, with particular emphasis on: data storage and sources clarification, strengthening the causal interpretation of results and ensuring robust legal alignment. The consortium reaffirmed that clinical relevance and methodological rigour must be a cenral topic in the project.
Looking Ahead
With federated learning infrastructure maturing, HDN endpoints being installed, FAIRification progressing, and use cases consolidating clinical relevance, the consortium is moving decisively towards delivering a scalable, privacy-preserving framework for multimodal health data analysis in Europe.
The meeting concluded with a clear set of next action points:
- Online Plenary Meeting planned for June 2026.
- Steering Committee meeting planned for April 2026.
- Federated Learning Workshop at AAU (May 2026).
The next two years will be key to the project’s results and impact, and HEREDITARY is aligned, coordinated and ready. Check out some photos from the event here:
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