by Admin | Nov 28, 2025 | Events, Hereditary
The HEREDITARY project is launching the GutBrainIE Task #6 of the BioASQ Lab as part of the CLEF 2026 conference, to be held from September 21-24, 2026 at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany.
The GutBrainIE is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) challenge focusing on advancing information extraction from biomedical literature. In this edition participants will be asked to develop and benchmark NLP systems capable of extracting structured knowledge from PubMed abstracts related to the gut-brain axis and its associations with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and mental health.
Subtasks Overview
The GutBrainIE task is divided into two main subtasks. In the first task, participants are asked to identify and classify specific text spans into predefined categories, while in the second one they have to determine if a particular relationship defined between two categories holds or not.
These tasks are also divided into 4 four subtasks covering entity recognition, disambiguation, and relation extraction:
- Subtask 6.1.1 – Named Entity Recognition (NER)
Participants must identify text spans and classify them into one of 13 predefined categories, such as bacteria, chemical or microbiota.
- Subtask 6.1.2 – Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD)
Following the Subtask 6.1.1, entity mentions must be linked to concept identifiers from selected biomedical reference resources.
- Subtask 6.2.1 – Mention-Level Relation Extraction (M-RE)
Teams must detect relations between specific entity mentions within abstracts.
- Subtask 6.2.2 – Concept-Level Relation Extraction (C-RE)
This subtask is related to the concept level, enabling systems to capture deeper knowledge connections.
Each task requires participants to submit structured tuples following clearly defined formats, with examples available in the official submission guidelines.
Growing International Participation
Interest in GutBrainIE continues to expand. Last year, 17 teams worldwide took part in entity and relation extraction challenges within BioASQ. The 2026 edition significantly extends the scope by introducing:
- A new entity linking task.
- One of the largest domain-specific relation extraction collections.
- Enhanced annotation efforts involving 10+ domain experts.
- Collaboration with 70+ trained layman annotators.
- A revised and improved dataset building upon previous editions.
Early registrants receive priority access to the training datasets, making this a valuable opportunity for research groups working on entity extraction, relation extraction, or entity disambiguation in specialized domains.
Registration for CLEF 2026 is open until April 2026!
by Admin | Oct 20, 2025 | Citizen Science and Public Engagement, Events, Hereditary
Last week, the HEREDITARY Project took part in two major European health innovation events: the X RIES Forum in Galicia, Spain, and the 5th Brain Innovation Days in Brussels, Belgium, both held on 15–16 October 2025. The project presence reaffirmed its commitment to collaboration and ethical data use across Europe.
The RIES Forum is a leading platform that brings together leaders from across the healthcare value chain to address international challenges in the health ecosystem. Organised by the Cluster Saúde de Galicia (CSG), the forum focuses on digitalisation, sustainability, and internationalisation of healthcare and promotes debate, innovation, and international cooperation.
The Brain Innovation Days, organised by the European Brain Council (EBC), are an international forum that gathers researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and industry stakeholders to discuss advances in brain research, neuroscience, and healthcare innovation. The 2025 edition focused on “The Adaptive Brain in a Fast-Evolving World”, exploring how science, technology, and society interact to support brain health.
RIES Forum 2025: International Challenges of the Health Ecosystem
During RIES2025, the HEREDITARY project took part in the roundtable “Health 2030: Advancing Towards Precision Medicine,” a dynamic session that brought together leading voices from healthcare innovation, data science, and genomics. Moderated by Anna Forment, Director of Digital Health and Head of Precision Medicine at NTT DATA Europe, the discussion explored how data-driven technologies are reshaping the future of healthcare.
The panel featured María Brión Martínez (Xenoma Galicia Project Coordinator), Abeer Fadda (Bioinformatics Lead at the European Genome-phenome Archive and researcher in the HEREDITARY project), Román López Seoane (PM4GOV, Ministry of Health’s Genomic Node SIGenES), and Prabs Arumugam (Clinical Innovation Lead, AWS UK Public Sector Healthcare). Together, they shared insights into how precision medicine is evolving through the smart and ethical use of genomic and clinical data.
A central theme of the conversation was the crucial role of data in building the future of precision medicine. Health systems generate vast and diverse datasets, but the real challenge lies in making them interoperable and secure, ensuring both privacy and accesibility. The panel also emphasized the need for multidisciplinary professional profiles that combine biomedical and genomic knowledge with data science and digital skills. Speakers underlined the huge opportunity to advance data sharing across hospitals, regions, and countries through federated data models, as HEREDITARY aims to do in the Federated Networking Infrastructure.
Finally, some areas in which precision medicina is doing great advances were highlighted, such as oncology and the study of rare diseases. The discussion perfectly reflected the collaborative and forward-looking spirit driving initiatives like RIES2025 and the European research landscape.
In addition, HEREDITARY engaged visitors at its exhibition stand, managed by FEUGA, the project’s communication leader, showcasing the project’s activities, vision, and expected impact, and providing a platform for dialogue with attendees from diverse fields of the health ecosystem.
HEREDITARY World Café at Brain Innovation Days
HEREDITARY hosted a World Café session at the Brain Innovation Days on 16 October, designed as an interactive format where participants rotated across tables to discuss key topics such as data privacy, multimodal health data integration, and AI-powered solutions. The session brought together a diverse group of patients, innovators, healthcare professionals, policymakers, and researchers, fostering open dialogue on how data-driven innovation can better serve people and improve brain and health outcomes.
Discussions underscored the importance of integrating diverse health data, to enable more personalised and human-centred care. Participants also emphasised the need for equitable representation in research, ensuring that data and clinical studies reflect the diversity of European populations.
Another key theme was co-creation and collaboration, recognising that innovation in healthcare requires all voices at the table, including patients whose lived experience can shape more relevant and impactful solutions. Conversations also explored the design of ethical and trustworthy AI, built with patients to ensure transparency, fairness, and clinical value, as well as the delicate balance between privacy and scientific progress.
At the end of the day, a HEREDITARY representative reported key insights from the session on the main stage, highlighting the value of collaborative dialogue in advancing brain and health research.
With its participation in both the RIES Forum and Brain Innovation Days, the HEREDITARY Project continues to expand its European reach, reinforcing networks and partnerships while promoting responsible and innovative approaches to genomic and health data.
by Admin | Sep 26, 2025 | Events, Hereditary
The HEREDITARY Project will be present at two major events this October: the X RIES Forum in Galicia (Spain) and the V Brain Innovation Days in Brussels (Belgium), both on 15-16 October 2025.
Each participation aims to strengthen collaboration and foster dialogue with key stakeholders across the European health ecosystem.
RIES 2025: International Challenges of the Health Ecosystem
HEREDITARY will join the X Fórum RIES, focus on International Challenges of the Health Ecosystem, held at La Toja Island, O Grove (Galicia, Spain). Organised by the Cluster Saúde de Galicia (CSG), RIES has become a leading forum that brings together leaders across the entire healthcare value chain. Celebrating its 10th edition, the event will once again serve as a platform for debate, innovation, and international cooperation, with a strong focus on digitalisation, sustainability, and the internationalisation of the health ecosystem.
As part of the event’s second day, on October 16 at 10:15, the roundtable on genomic medicine will feature Abeer Fadda, bioinformatics lead at the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) and researcher in the HEREDITARY project. She will join other speakers from NTT Data, Xenoma Galicia Project, PM4GOV and AWS to discuss advances in data-driven healthcare, explore how cutting-edge technologies are transforming genomic research, and reflect on the challenges of ensuring secure, ethical, and scalable applications of genomic data in clinical and health contexts.
Also, HEREDITARY will be present with a stand in the exhibition area, offering participants the opportunity to learn more about the project’s vision, activities, and expected impact.
If you are interested in attending the event, here is a link with the tickets information: https://ries2025.serglo.es/
HEREDITARY World Café at Brain Innovation Days
In parallel, HEREDITARY will also take part in the 5th edition of the Brain Innovation Days, organised by the European Brain Council (EBC) in Brussels under the theme “The Adaptive Brain in a Fast-Evolving World”.
As part of the programme, it will be hosted a special session HEREDITARY-targeted: HEREDITARY World Café on 16 October from 09:15 to 10:30 CET. Designed as an informal and interactive format, the session will bring together participants from diverse backgrounds to explore key questions related to brain and health. Small groups will rotate across tables every 20 minutes, generating fresh insights and perspectives. At the end of the day, a HEREDITARY project representative will report back the discussions on the main stage of the Brain Innovation Days.
More information, on the concept note here.
To get a head start on the topics to be explored during the World Café, we encourage participants to check out the podcast launched this summer as part of the Brain Talks series, also organised by the Brain Innovation Days. The podcast introduces several of the key themes that will be discussed during the session, such as data privacy, multimodal health data or AI powered solutions, providing valuable context and sparking new ideas ahead of the session.
With its active presence at both RIES Forum and Brain Innovation Days, the HEREDITARY Project continues to expand its international reach, fostering collaboration and knowledge Exchange across the European health ecosystem.
by Admin | Sep 19, 2025 | Events
The HEREDITARY project took an active role at the 16th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2025, held in Madrid, Spain, from 9–12 September 2025. As part of the BioASQ Lab, the HEREDITARY team contributed to the GutBrainIE task, advancing research on the gut-brain axis through cutting-edge information extraction methods.
Continuing its tradition since 2000, the CLEF has been a leading forum for the evaluation of multilingual and multimodal information access systems, bringing together researchers and practitioners. This year’s edition combined a peer-reviewed scientific conference with a series of evaluation laboratories and workshops, fostering collaboration across communities working on cross-language and domain-specific information retrieval.
One of the highlights of CLEF 2025 was the BioASQ Lab, where the GutBrainIE task drew strong participation from academic and industry teams. HEREDITARY partners, including HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Ontotext, TU Graz, Aalborg University, and the University of Padua showcased methods and resources that contribute to a deeper understanding of the gut-brain axis.
The HEREDITARY team achieved remarkable results, including:
- The paper “Trusting Gut Instincts: Transformer-Based Extraction of Structured Data from Gut-Brain Axis Publications” presented by Aalborg University earned 1st place in all three Relation Extraction subtasks and 2nd place in Named-Entity Recognition (NER).
- The ONTuG team, a collabortation ToGS and Graphwise, secured 2nd place in the Binary Tag-Based Subtask.
- The Graphwise team also achieved 2nd place in Ternary Mention-Based Subtask.
These successes underline HEREDITARY’s central role in developing innovative methods and resources for biomedical information extraction, reinforcing the project’s contribution to research on complex domains such as the gut-brain axis.
The outcomes will be published in the forthcoming CLEF 2025 BioASQ Working Notes, ensuring the project’s impact reaches the wider research community.
by Admin | Jul 22, 2025 | Events, Hereditary
July 22 marks World Brain Day, a global initiative aimed at raising awareness about the importance of brain health and neuroscience research. This year’s campaign is organized under the slogan “Brain Health for all ages”, highlighting the importance and need of taking care of our brains across every stage of life, and it’s built around five key action points: Awareness, Education, Prevention, Access to Care and Disability Management, and Advocacy.
What is Brain Health?
At its core, it’s about keeping our minds sharp, resilient, and actived—something that affects how we think, learn, remember, and manage with life’s ups and downs. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), brain health includes cognitive, sensory, emotional, and motor functions, and plays a key role in helping us reach our full potential at any age. Supporting brain health isn’t just about avoiding disease, it’s about creating the right conditions, physically, socially, and environmentally, to help our minds thrive.
Prioritizing brain health throughout life can go a long way in preventing or delaying many neurological conditions. Primary prevention, early detection and prompt treatment are some of the key objectives to focus on.
HEREDITARY contribution: World Café at Brain Innovation Days 2025
As part of our ongoing commitment to advancing brain health, HEREDITARY is also contributing to this year’s Brain Innovation Days 2025 in Brussels. Organized by the European Brain Council, the event brings together key players from across Europe’s brain research and innovation landscape. Taking place on October 15–16 under the theme “The Adaptive Brain in a Fast-Evolving World,” this fifth edition will feature the HEREDITARY World Café, a participatory session designed to foster dialogue and creative thinking among stakeholders.
This session will be hosted on October 16 (09:15 – 10:30 CET). Participants, including clinicians, researchers, policymakers and patient advocates, will discuss and share insights about different topics: brain health, ethics, health data or AI solutions. A cozy room featuring a bar corner will accommodate multiple tables, each addressing a specific topic. At each of these tables, 5 people from all horizons will take a drink and tackle a question from their unique perspective. After 20 minutes, each of the table will host new guests for new insights. At the end of the day, tables hosts will report back on the main stage.
As a preview of the World Café you can listen to the episode of the Brain Talks Podcast, where Elisabetta Biasin, member of HEREDITARY, explains the vision of the project.
After all, at HEREDITARY we remain dedicated to advancing brain health through collaboration. On this World Brain Day, we reaffirm our commitment to supporting initiatives that raise awareness and foster solutions for neurological challenges at every stage of life.
by Admin | May 7, 2025 | Events
On Friday, 16th May, HEREDITARY will participate in a joint webinar alongside two other leading EU-funded initiatives — LETHE and BRAINTEASER — to explore how federated learning is shaping the future of neurodegenerative disease research.
The online event, titled “Federated Learning for Neurodegenerative Disease Research: A New Path to Risk Reduction and Better Care“, will take place from 10:30 to 11:30 CEST. It offers a unique opportunity to learn how cutting-edge machine learning approaches are being applied across collaborative European research efforts, enabling a secure, privacy-preserving data collaboration to improve risk prediction, diagnosis, and patient care in neurodegenerative diseases.
It will begin providing the audience with an introduction to federated learning and then dive into examples of how federated learning is being used in the three projects. There will be a chance at the end of the webinar for the audience to participate and ask our panellists questions.
Hereditary’s participation in the webinar
HEREDITARY will take center stage through a presentation by Umberto Manera, from Università degli Studi di Torino, a researcher partner for both HEREDITARY and BRAINTEASER, who will discuss how federated learning techniques in HEREDITARY can advance AI model developed by BRAINTEASER Project in clinical settings. Check the agenda, speakers and learn more about the projects here.
Join us to discover how federated learning is opening new frontiers in health research and paving the way for more personalized and effective care across Europe. Sign up here.
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