On 17 and 18 January 2024, the GenoMed4All consortium met in-person to celebrate its 6th General Assembly in Barcelona. Our partner institution VHIR hosted the two-day meeting at their premises at Hospital Vall d’Hebron, where they warmly welcomed the attending partners who travelled there from all across Europe.
This GA represented a major milestone in the project’s journey — not only it gave partners the opportunity to meet face-to-face and enjoy some networking, but it also laid the foundations for what will be the last year working together as the GenoMed4All consortium. With the project set to finish at the end of 2024, the expectations and enthusiasm levels were at an all time high in Barcelona, as the next months will be crucial to bring together all the different strands of our EU-funded initiative.
GenoMed4All and SYNTHEMA: Paving the way for the next chapter in AI-powered healthcare for hematology
GenoMed4All’s Project Coordinator, Federico Alvarez from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM), opened the first day of the meeting with a joint session alongside partners from SYNTHEMA — a sister European initiative also exploring the use of artificial intelligence and clinical data to advance precision medicine in hematology.
After highlighting the synergies shared by both projects coordinated by UPM — which had been previously identified during [an online session in October 2023 — Principal Investigator Mar Mañú from VHIR and Scientific Director at ERN-EuroBloodNet took centre stage to introduce the progress made on the use case shared across both projects, focused on Sickle Cell Disease.
On the path to building a revolutionary, cross-European Federated Learning platform for clinical data
The GenoMed4All assembly continued with in-depth presentations by consortium partners leading the 9 work packages that conform the core tasks of the project.
From data privacy, AI user trust, algorithm development, stakeholder engagement and patients involvement, they covered all the key topics feeding into the project’s ultimate goal: to build a cross-European clinical data platform powered by Federated Learning to advance precision medicine in hematology.
Partners also laid out exciting plans for GenoMed4All’s journey as the project enters its last year. In the next few months we will unveil an exciting new series of webinars launched alongside ERN-EuroBloodNet, which marks the second instalment in our Educational Training Program focused on exploring the use of AI in Hematology. For those who missed the first wave, the sessions are available to watch on-demand on our YouTube channel.
On the technical side, the consortium will be dedicating their efforts to tackle 3 main priorities: finishing up the internal set up of remaining Federated Learning nodes, planning for the onboarding of clinical partners into the platform, and co-designing a sustainability plan as GenoMed4All evolves into its next phase through SYNTHEMA.
We look forward to continue working together to shape a new era of precision medicine for hematology through the power of AI and genomics.