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 22, 2025 | Hereditary
On 18 September 2025, KU Leuven, leader of the HEREDITARY Project’s Legal Work Package (WP7), hosted the third Legal Workshop focusing on two relevant questions:
- When AI models are to be considered anonymous?
- What does the GDPR (and related guidance) say about data protection of AI models in healthcare?
The session, led by Elisabetta Biasin from the KU Leuven Centre for IT & IP Law (CiTiP), explored the latest opinion of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) on the processing of personal data in the context of AI models. This guidance is particularly relevant for healthcare-related AI Models, such as those developed within HEREDITARY.
The session began with the definition of some basic concepts that had already been discussed in previous workshops: personal data, sensitive data, identifiability, and anonymous/pseudonymous data. The legal foundations regulating these concepts in the European Union are the AI Act and the GDPR.
A key takeaway was the EDPB’s position that AI models trained on personal data cannot automatically be considered anonymous. Instead, their status must be assessed case by case, taking into account the risk of regurgitation and extraction of the personal data used in the training, even unintentionally. Participants discussed scenarios in which anonymisation could be achieved, as well as the technical and organisational safeguards required to reduce identification risks.
The discussion highlighted the complexity of ensuring compliance: while some argued that neural networks typically abstract away personal identifiers, others pointed out that research has shown it is possible to reconstruct sensitive information from trained models. This underlines the importance of rigorous testing, documentation, and risk assessment throughout an AI model’s lifecycle.
The discussion also touched on the intersection of GDPR and the new EU AI Act, both of which set obligations for developers and users of AI systems. For HEREDITARY, these insights are not only theoretical but directly influence how the project designs and tests its AI tools for healthcare applications.
The workshop concluded with a forward-looking perspective: evaluating anonymity in AI is challenging but essential and posible, and further research is needed in areas such as anonymisation techniques, cybersecurity, and laws compliance.
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 | Sep 2, 2025 | Hereditary
On 28 August 2025 the HEREDITARY project successfully completed its first Official Review Meeting with the Project Officer and external reviewers. During the session, the consortium showcased the main achievements of each Work Package (WP), highlighting the progress made during the first 18 months of the Project.
Reviewers commended the consortium for its strong coordination, the high quality of deliverables, the collaboration with other EU projects, and the timely progress across technical, clinical, societal and legal dimensions. The meeting was well organised and full of valuable insights that will improve the implementation of the project in its next phases.
Building a secure federated health-data network
One of the most significant milestones has been the deployment of a federated health-data infrastructure across four hospitals. This network enables secure, privacy-preserving analysis without moving sensitive data, a critical step for GDPR compliance and EHDS ambitions. The first horizontal and vertical learning experiments on ALS data were completed. The five multicentre clinical use cases that will be used to provide data and test the project’s developments have been defined: ALS prognosis, multi-disease diagnosis, Parkinson’s eye imaging, gut-brain phenotyping in healthy cohorts and gut-brain linkage in disease.
Advancing Multimodal Semantic Integration and AI Advanced Analytics
The project delivered an open HERO Ontology, integrating clinical, genomic, and imaging data plus a live SPARQL explorer. Together with a polystore prototype, this provides a unified semantic view across diverse health data sources: compiling 9000 candidate terms and 1700 concepts for a multilingual medical terminology hub. PrivEval was also delivered: a hands-on tool that assesses privacy leakage in synthetic datasets.
New AI tools such as PubMiner, an LLM pipeline that converts PubMed articles into knowledge-graph triples, are already contributiong to biomarker discovery in ALS. At the same time, multimodal self-supervised models are already outperforming single-modality baselines on internal EEG, MRI and omics benchmark.
Innovative visualisation and citizen engagement
We require advanced visualisation techniques to interact with large volumes of data. That is why the consortium launched award-winning visualisation tools like Droplets and interactive platforms such as OnSET and ALviS, offering new ways to explore complex health data.
At the same time, Health Social Labs (HSLs) have been activated across Europe to engage citizens, patients, and clinicians in co-design activities, ensuring that HEREDITARY’s advances are socially robust and aligned with real-world needs.
Ethics, law, and policy alignment
A comprehensive inventory of GDPR, Data Governance Act, AI Act, and cybersecurity requirements has been completed, embedding privacy and ethics by design. Also, a FAIR-compliant Data Management Plan an ethics playbook aligned with those regulations were delivered. Reviewers highlighted this as a unique strength of HEREDITARY, demonstrating how technical innovation is matched with legal and ethical foresight.
All these advances can be consulted and expanded upon through the 44 scientific publications available on Zenodo, 23 deliverables and the new Open Hub web section, which ensure widespread dissemination of the project.
Overall, the first 18 months of HEREDITARY have laid a strong foundation for achieving its objectives. With its federated platform, semantic integration tools, advanced AI, and legal analysis, the project is already delivering results beyond the state of the art, bringing Europe closer to a trusted, cross-border health data ecosystem that enables early and more effective diagnosis and treatment strategies for ALS, Parkinson’s and gut–brain disorders.
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