by Admin | Apr 13, 2026 | Hereditary
How are our gut and brain connected, and how does this relationship influence the way we think, feel and behave? Within the HEREDITARY project, this question is at the heart of ongoing research in Work Package 2, where partners are exploring the complex interplay between microbiota, brain activity, and human behaviour.
The Deliverable 2.4: Linkage and feature extraction from gut-brain, intermediate evaluation, led by Radboud University Medical Center, marks an important step forward in this journey. Building on earlier work, it provides new evidence that combining multimodal data with advanced AI can reveal meaningful patterns linking the gut and the brain, bringing us closer to understanding this intricate biological system.
From data to discovery: integrating the gut and the brain
At the core of this research lies a simple but ambitious idea: to move beyond isolated measurements, and, instead, analyse the gut and brain as a connected system.
To achieve this, HEREDITARY researchers worked with data from the Healthy Brain Study (HBS), a large cohort of deeply characterised individuals. By combining brain imaging (resting-state fMRI), gut microbiota profiles, and behavioural and physiological data, the team applied a supervised multimodal data integration method (an advanced AI method) known as SuperBigFLICA, an extension of Linked Independent Component Analysis (LICA), designed to work with large-scale, heterogeneous datasets. This approach allows researchers to identify latent components (shared patterns across different types of data), which, in this context, correspond to hidden structures in the data that capture how microbiome composition, brain connectivity, and individual behavioural are interrelated.
One of the most relevant outcomes of this work is the identification of robust gut-brain components (multivariate patterns that simultaneously involve microbiome features and brain activity). In particular, one component revealed a strong interaction between gut microbial composition, brain networks linked to reward and emotion (such as limbic and default mode networks), and health and behavioural measures such as anxiety sensitivity, life stress, and Body Mass Index (BMI).
In an independant validation, this component was also able to predict food-related behaviour from an independent task. This task reflects how individuals value unhealthy vs. healthy food, and their likelihood of choosing unhealthy options. These findings validate the feasibility of supervised multimodal integration and identify promising biological targets for follow-up analyses. It shows that gut–brain interactions are not only measurable, but also meaningfully linked to real-life behaviour.
Advancing Use Cases 4 and 5
These findings directly contribute to HEREDITARY’s Use Case 4 and lay the groundwork for Use Case 5.
- Use Case 4 focuses on understanding gut–brain interactions in healthy populations. The intermediate results confirm that it is possible to identify stable and biologically meaningful gut–brain patterns at population scale.
- Use Case 5 will extend this approach to clinical data, exploring whether similar patterns can explain variations in mental health conditions and maladaptive behaviours, with broader applications in the prediction of other gut (.eg. Ulcerative Colitis) and brain related conditions (e.g. depressive episodes).
What comes next?
The work does not stop here. The HEREDITARY project will evaluate the robustness of the discovered components, apply them to broader clinical data, and extend analyses to metabolic markers and future hypotheses-driven studies on stress, diet, and hedonic eating. It will directly address disease relevance by examining whether the same multivariate gut–brain components explain variation in psychopathology and maladaptive eating in psychiatric populations.
The next phase of the research will deepen the analysis of how gut–brain interactions relate to behaviour. These analyses will continue to leverage multimodal datasets (including brain imaging, microbiome data, stress responses and behavioural tasks) to further explore how stress, anxiety and dietary factors influence food choices through gut–brain mechanisms, and how the interaction between the gut microbiome and reward-related brain connectivity contributes to stress-related eating patterns in daily life. In parallel, future work will focus on defining what constitutes a “healthy” gut–brain profile and ensuring robust clinical interpretation of results.
by Admin | Apr 7, 2026 | Citizen Science and Public Engagement
This interview was conducted by OBSERVA, a partner in the HEREDITARY consortium, as part of its efforts to promote citizen engagement and give visibility to the voices of people living with neurodegenerative diseases. In this first part of a three-part full interview, Dolores Ayala Velázquez shares her personal journey, reflecting on how her scientific background intersects with her experience as a patient and how she navigates the daily challenges of living with Progressive Bulbar Palsy (PBP).
Could you briefly tell us your personal story and how your experience as a patient and your scientific training coexist within it?
I am a person with extensive academic training and experience in teaching, research, and cultural outreach. I hold Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral degrees in Science, specializing in Physics, particularly Statistical Physics, Fluid Theory, and Auditory Acoustics. I have also completed several diplomas in Education, Teaching, Family, and Counseling for individuals from childhood to old age. I also hold a Bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies. I was a teacher for 50 years.
I have a beautiful family consisting of my husband, our two daughters and one son, and three grandchildren in their teens.
In 2021, the symptoms of dyslalia gradually appeared, making it increasingly difficult for me to express myself freely and fluently. As I spoke, my voice became hoarse, losing its tone, timbre, and volume, making it impossible for my listeners to understand me. Regarding food, I knew I couldn’t drink any cold liquids because I would choke, although I could still manage to drink hot tea or punch. Dry foods like rice and stringy foods like meat would get stuck in my throat; sometimes I could eat them, and other times I couldn’t.
In 2022, a speech therapist diagnosed me with dysphagia and dyslalia. This marked the beginning of the process to determine the diagnosis of my condition, which took nearly two years, that is Progressive Bulbar Palsy (PBP), thankfully not Bulbar ALS. However, I still fear that it could develop due to the uncertainty surrounding the understanding of these diseases.
The aspect of how my experience as a patient and my scientific training coexist is a very interesting question for me, because my first reaction upon receiving the news of ALS and that I had about three years to live, was to think that what I had done before was not useful to face this reality, therefore, I had wasted my life on things that did not serve me and I began to wonder what I could do to give meaning to my life in just three years.
It was a very painful experience. It took me several months to realize I was wrong and that everything I had learned and the effort it took to achieve it were valuable because they are part of who I am. So, I am not defenseless; rather, I possess extensive training in addressing, understanding, and resolving complex problems. So ALS is just one more complex problem, with initial conditions and treatment strategies yet to be defined, regardless of what the specialists say, who, from experience, I know aren’t always right. Instead of becoming more saddened or letting the weight of a neurodegenerative disease crush me, I decided to research everything known about it, to understand its effects on the body and learn how to manage it.
From your perspective, what does it mean to live with a neurodegenerative disease beyond the clinical aspect?
From my experience, living with a neurodegenerative disease like PBP means dealing with the daily challenges posed by my diet, speech, saliva management, facial expression, and posture, among others.
- Nutrition. While I was able to eat enough to nourish my body and allow it to perform its vital functions, and to have some energy to think, move, and maintain a degree of independence, my weight remained stable (for one year and eight months). As the situation worsened and I consumed what little I ate simply through the effort of eating, I began to lose weight rapidly (from 60 kg to 47 kg in seven months). I was so lacking in energy that I had poor balance, I felt dizzy when turning my head, and I looked listless, very tired, and vulnerable. The ultra-protein, ultra-calorie diet recommended by the nutritionist helped me begin to regain weight. Then I understood the function of the gastrostomy, which several specialists had tried to explain to me, but without telling me: “Your difficulties eating orally can put your life at risk.” Since June 2024 I have had a gastrostomy tube through which I receive the ultra-protein and ultra-calorie food that my body requires and I have regained my weight, in fact I now weigh 62 kg. Switching from oral feeding to tube feeding has important implications, because depending on the digestive process I can go from constipation to loose stools, also considering substitutes like fiber and laxatives, which must be adapted each day to the particular needs of my body and in these I am the only specialist, and it is not convenient for me to leave the responsibility in the hands of the gastroenterologist or the nutritionist, because unexpected and very uncomfortable accidents can happen to me.
- Speech and communication. To speak, I use my mouth, and it’s constantly filled with excessive saliva, which is sometimes more like mucus or phlegm because of how thick it gets. Besides its consistency, saliva plays a very important role in speech, particularly in where it concentrates. When it’s in the oral cavity, I can produce sounds with my chest and head, but the saliva makes them sound nasal and muffled, which makes them difficult to understand. If phlegm concentrates between the soft palate, pharynx, and tongue, producing sounds becomes more difficult. This is because, feeling a blockage in the throat that also affects the vocal cords, it is harder to produce sounds with the chest, and impossible to do so with the head due to the blockage caused by the thick membrane of phlegm, which seems to be boiling in a witch’s cauldron and makes me feel like I am suffocating because air cannot pass through either the airway or the mouth. It’s easy to imagine that under these conditions, the sounds I produce end up being the noises of a monster from beyond the grave, no matter how hard I try to articulate them correctly. Thus, the intelligibility of my speech is chaotic; at times it might be more or less understandable, but then it shifts to otherworldly, nonsensical sounds. There’s an additional, very serious problem: the psychological and emotional impact of hearing myself speak. Because while I’m talking to myself, my voice sounds clear and crisp as before, and I even forget how I’m speaking as I utter the words out loud. I admit that sometimes I feel like crying, and other times like despairing. Fortunately, I manage to control myself and find (or am asked to use) the whiteboard or the phone app to communicate my ideas.
- Saliva management. Besides the difficulties saliva creates when I speak, it’s difficult to control it with my lips. Previously, I couldn’t even close my lips, much less achieve the necessary lip seal to contain saliva and food; I was constantly drooling. Now it happens intermittently, when the amount of saliva is excessive and I can’t manage it in my mouth. But in both cases, I need to have a cloth handy to dry my mouth and remove the excess saliva. Experiencing this when I’m alone is desperate, distressing, uncomfortable, and annoying, and when I’m around others, it feels embarrassing and inappropriate. I imagine it must be disgusting or repulsive to them, which makes me feel even worse. In fact, I find it incredible that with all the medical resources available, no alternative ways have been found to control excessive saliva production, beyond botulinum toxin, which doesn’t work for some of us.
- Facial expression. I like to smile to show the joy I feel in life and knowing that I am loved in a special way by God. Between 2019 and 2020, I was still giving talks via webinars or Zoom. On one occasion, one of my daughters, who was watching me from her computer, sent me a message saying, “Mommy, please smile, you look sad and your cheeks are droopy like a Saint Bernard’s.” Initially, I didn’t understand what she meant, but I made an effort to smile more during the talk. Then it dawned on me that she was referring to our dogs, with their droopy cheeks and sad, drooling faces. After the conference, I decided to look in the mirror to confirm what my daughter had told me, and sure enough, even though I was “smiling,” all you could see was my expressionless, wooden face. This really affected me, and I worked hard to get my smile back, which I finally managed after a period of sustained effort and dedication.
- Posture. Believe it or not, while I was eating only through my mouth, I never felt like I couldn’t support my head with my neck. It wasn’t until shortly after they inserted the feeding tube that I started to feel my head getting heavy and tilting to one side, and now it happens more frequently, for example, after I take a bath. I have to be very careful to prevent it from tilting to one side.
Are you part of a patient association or community? Could you briefly describe it (size, location, main activities)?
No. In the process of identifying the diagnosis of my disease, I had the opportunity to attend the ALS Clinic at the Mayo Clinic in Florida and it made a very good impression on me. There, they told me about two organizations in Mexico City that we could contact to join a community with ALS patients. We got in touch with the Foundation that serves people with limited financial resources, and since it’s located on the opposite side of our city, we’ve focused on helping the families by giving them food baskets to celebrate Christmas. The second association required us to register beforehand, before establishing contact and communicating with its representatives. Given our circumstances, this didn’t seem appropriate, and we decided against following their procedures. This association has greater financial and educational resources and a website with useful information.
Truthfully, I fear contact because I have always been and am an empathetic person (I have the diagnosis of being highly sensitive), now that I feel vulnerable and can barely cope with my own problem, it seems to me that the suffering of others is extreme and I begin to devalue my situation and think “I should do this, I could do that, I need to overcome this other thing”, and it increases my tension and anguish.
What role do you think patient communities play in research and in the daily lives of those living with these diseases?
Nearly 40 years ago, my husband and I founded the non-profit organization Oirá y Hablará (Hear and Speak) to support parents and other family members of deaf children in helping them reach their full potential and integrate into society, without their disability being a limiting factor. This happened when we learned that our son had profound deafness with a speech threshold of 95 dB. As physicists, my husband and I could provide scientific, technical, and human support through our own experience as parents of a little boy of just three years old, who had to learn to communicate and develop his potential to survive in life. But the most important thing about Oirá y Hablará were the experiences that the parents, siblings, uncles, and grandparents shared with us about their interaction with their little ones with limited hearing, from funny anecdotes to very profound lessons, which made us reflect and encouraged us not to be defeated by difficult situations and to keep going, enthusiastically and joyfully taking advantage of the experiences that we received month after month at the association meeting.
Based on these experiences and my own current one, I believe these communities possess a legacy of knowledge about the impact of illness on each individual, because we know its effects are individual, different for each person, depending on their physical, psychological, cultural, and emotional state. Furthermore, the difficulties we face and the harm caused by the ego and superiority attitudes of some of the specialists who treat us – doctors, scientists, technicians, and therapists – and also by some caregivers, are not taken into account.
What the sick person needs is respect, closeness, and understanding. But it seems they forget that we are people with the same dignity as children of God as those who do not suffer from any of these illnesses. We need to be heard and have our voices heard, because what we have to say is very valuable, so valuable that no one else can express it as we can. Despite our difficulty in communicating it, we patients are the experts on what we feel physically, mentally, and emotionally each day, because it’s about our experiences, pains, and personal difficulties that we encounter moment after moment. If mice are closely observed when used as guinea pigs to test drugs or equipment, the least we can expect is that we, as human beings, are actively listened to and taken seriously, because we are the primary and genuine source of information for specialists.
In my opinion, specialists would greatly benefit from learning about the experiences and difficulties faced by people with ALS, for example, those who share their stories at meetings of associations for people with similar illnesses. This knowledge can help specialists reassess the situation of the person or people in their care and provide them with valuable insights and ingenious ideas on how to resolve unforeseen or difficult situations that others have already encountered. Furthermore, the staff of these institutions possess a wealth of knowledge and experience regarding the symptoms, attitudes, feelings, and specific situations of people with rare diseases, which can be extremely useful when developing research projects.
by Admin | Mar 3, 2026 | Hereditary
The HEREDITARY project has been granted 40,000 credits from the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC EU Node) to support, among other things, its federated learning activities within a secure European research infrastructure.
About the EOSC EU Node
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC EU Node) is the operational platform of the EOSC Federation, designed to facilitate open, collaborative and data-driven research in Europe. It supports multidisciplinary scientific work by providing access to digital research services such as computing and storage resources, containerized environments, and collaborative tools through institutional credentials. The platform promotes the sharing and reuse of research outputs in a secure, GDPR-compliant cloud ecosystem based on FAIR data principles and a credit-based access model.
The awarded credits will be used to deploy and maintain the central server required for federated learning experiments on EOSC virtual machines. Federated learning allows multiple institutions to collaboratively train machine learning models without sharing sensitive data. By using EOSC infrastructure, HEREDITARY can efficiently manage firewall configurations and incoming connections, overcoming common technical barriers associated with institutional IT restrictions.
The EOSC EU Node credits will support several weeks of experimentation, with server configurations adapted to different model sizes and algorithmic requirements. In parallel, HEREDITARY is exploring the development of an API-based solution that would allow researchers to deploy experiment-specific software containers through the EOSC Cloud Container platform. This approach aims to streamline workflows, facilitate testing and deployment, and potentially deliver open-source tools that could benefit the broader research community.
by Admin | Feb 24, 2026 | Hereditary
How can hospitals collaborate on sensitive medical data without ever sharing the data itself? This is the core question behind Federated Learning (FL), and one of the key technological pillars of the HEREDITARY project.
Over the past two years, HEREDITARY has progressively designed, deployed and tested a federated learning infrastructure capable of connecting medical centres across Europe while ensuring that raw patient data never leaves its original location. What began as a technical design challenge has now evolved into a secure network supporting distributed machine learning experiments across heterogeneous datasets.
Building the Foundations: Computing Infrastructures
Federated Learning only works if each participating centre has the technical capacity to train models locally and communicate securely with the rest of the network. The first step was ensuring this. Under Deliverable D2.14 in Month 9 and lead by SURF, partners established secure computing infrastructures capable of handling sensitive clinical and genomic data, equipping centres with appropriate storage, processing power and secure communication channels. Thanks to this, data owners can process data locally, train models without centralising records and exchange model updates securely within the federation.
With local infrastructures in place, the next step was to design and validate the full federated learning architecture. Deliverable D2.11 in Month 18 presents a federated infrastructure that is secure, flexible and deployable across heterogeneous environments, including high-performance computing systems and cloud platforms. Encrypted communication via gRPC/TLS was implemented to protect model exchanges, while Secure Aggregation mechanisms (SecAgg/SecAgg+) were integrated to prevent the central server from accessing individual model updates.
The system was engineered to support both horizontal federated learning (same data types across centres) and vertical federated learning (different data modalities distributed across centres). Dedicated project workshops demonstrated that both approaches could run successfully across geographically distributed nodes, even when accounting for network latency between countries. By Month 18, HEREDITARY had a federated network capable of running both horizontal and vertical learning experiments on ALS data, without moving any raw records.
Securing the Communication: Communication Protocols
Security does not stop at this point. Deliverable D2.15 in Month 22 dives deeper into how model updates are protected during training. SURF analysed and validated advanced communication protocols within the federated learning framework. Three key mechanisms were the driving force behind this:
- Secure Aggregation ensures that the server can combine model updates without seeing any individual contribution. Clients (Medical Centres) mask their updates using cryptographic techniques so that when all updates are aggregated, the masks cancel out, but no single update can be inspected independently. Tests showed no significant decrease in model performance, with only a modest increase in runtime due to additional communication steps.
- Differential Privacy was also evaluated, introducing controlled noise to model updates to further reduce the risk of information leakage, again with minimal performance degradation.
- Trusted Execution Environments were explored as an additional layer of security, though their hardware requirements make them less practical in heterogeneous clinical environments.
Beyond Simulation: paving the way for actual implementation
One key lesson emerging from this work is that federated learning is relatively straightforward in simulation, but deploying it across real institutions introduces new challenges: hardware variability, network latency across countries, IT coordination and regulatory compliance. Through interactive workshops and live experiments, HEREDITARY has moved beyond theoretical experimentation to operational deployment.
Today, the project operates a federated network linking multimodal clinical data without centralising any raw records. Advanced AI models can be trained across distributed datasets and privacy-enhancing technologies can be implemented with limited performance trade-offs. The infrastructure is reliable, secure and resilient. This “data stays at source” approach aligns closely with the principles of the European Health Data Space, demonstrating that privacy-preserving, cross-border health data collaboration is technically feasible.
The next step will arrive in June 2026, when the project moves from validated design to consolidated implementation. Deliverable D2.12 will formalise the full implementation of the federated infrastructure, while Federated Learning will demonstrate its clinical relevance through Deliverable D2.17, presenting intermediate results from the neurodegenerative use cases. Together, these upcoming milestone will mark a transition from infrastructure validation to scientific and clinical impact.
by Admin | Feb 12, 2026 | Hereditary
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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