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.
by Admin | Jun 3, 2025 | Hereditary
On Wednesday, May 28th, 2025, the HEREDITARY consortium held its online Plenary Meeting, bringing together all project partners to review and present the progress made during the first 18 months of the project.
The representatives of each work package presented the updates, key achievements, and ongoing activities, providing a comprehensive overview of the project’s status. All 18 partners attended the presentations and provided feedback and ideas for each of the presentations. These discussions are essential to ensure that the project moves forward in a unified way. This meeting also served as a rehearsal for the upcoming first official review with the European Commission, scheduled for August 28th, 2025.
The main focus of the meeting consisted on the presentation of each Work Package. The WP leaders highlighted the project’s achievements during the first 18 months, describing the process and decisions undertaken to reach the current stage of the project.
Beyond that, one of the most engaging parts of the session was a series of live demonstrations showcasing technical progress and early results across different areas of the project. The Università degli Studi di Padova, Ontotext and TU Graz presented the demos highlighting the applications developed within the framework of the project on Data, AI, Federated Learning, Image Visualization, and more.
In addition, the meeting included detailed updates on all five Use Cases, covering status, challenges, and the next steps. Each Use Case provided insights into how their domain-specific work is progressing and contributing to the broader objectives of HEREDITARY.
This meeting contributed to improving presentations, aligning key messages and reinforcing the collaboration between the consortium in the lead up to the August Official Review.
by Admin | Feb 11, 2025 | Events, Hereditary
The HEREDITARY project consortium has carried out its third Plenary Meeting, the first in-person in 2025, which took place on the 5th and 6th of February in Barcelona (Spain). Representatives of partner institutions met there for two productive days of updating, planning, learning, and reviewing the next stages for the Project’s second year.
Day 1 of the meeting included an overview of the project state, the introduction of progress updates on each work package, along with internal workshops or activities to enhance the participants’ capacities. Each WP lead partner delivered a presentation to allow the consortium members to learn first-hand about the advancements made to date and future steps.
On Day 2, WPs’ presentations were completed early in the morning and, then, participants focused on data discussions on genomics, gut-brain interplay, parkinson’s disease in the eye and evidence-based knowledge base construction. They proceeded with the presentation of the Information Extraction CLEF 2025 challenge and closed the day with a short summing-up session.
Decoding 2024
The first year of work has laid the foundations on which the project will be built. One of our most noticiable achievement this year has been the delivery of 16 high-quality deliverables, all on time, demonstrating our efficiency and dedication to project development. These deliverables are available on our website, and we encourage anyone interested to consult those that are publicly accessible, on our zenodo profile.
Throughout 2024, several significant technical advancements have been made, including:
- The Review and Verification of Use-Cases (UNITO – D2.16 and D2.19), which include the decision on the proprietary and public data formats, structures, and sharing methods.
- A Computing Infrastructure Setup (SURF – D2.14) at medical centers and the test of a communication protocol.
- Ontology Development for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) (UNIPD – D3.1), including the design of federated execution methods, as part of the Federated Learning Working Group.
- Medical Terminology Creation (UNL – D3.4), encompassing corpus construction, terminology extraction, and conceptual/lexical relations.
- The development of initial visualization components (TUGRAZ – D5.1 and D5.3) for sequences, networks, text, high-dimensional, spatial, image, and simulation data. Focusing on brain, gut microbiota, gut-brain, ALS, clustering and Droplets.
- The definition of Health Social Labs (OBSERVA – D6.1) and the implementation of the first ones.
- A preliminary overview of the legal and ethical requirements (KU LEUVEN – D7.1) for the HEREDITARY project.
- The launch of various communication channels (FEUGA – D8.1), aligned with the project’s communication strategy.
New year, new goals
This meeting serves as a launching pad for all that is yet to come during this exciting 2025. Some of them are:
- In 2025, we will have 25 new deliverables, the project maximum number of deliverables in one year.
- Several tasks will start during this year.
- Set up the federated learning and analytics infrastructure. Which must work in in testing environment, for which use cases 1 and 2 will be used. HEREDITARY must deliver concrete applications of federated infrastructure design.
- Develop the federated workflow execution engine on top of the federated data management infrastructure.
- The improvement in FAIRness, focusing on discoverability, for the participating data sources in HEREDITARY.
- We will also hold our first reporting to the European Commission in June 2025!
All this being said, 2025 is set to be a promising year in which together we will continue to make strides towards our goal to improve the way we approach healthcare.
Stay tuned for the latest news and updates!
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