Marilena Bicchieri is a Project Manager at Humanitas Research Hospital, where she oversees the institution’s participation in European and international projects. Her scientific background combines a degree in chemistry with a PhD in molecular oncology, and a research focus mostly dedicated towards investigating the therapeutic use of microRNAs for breast tumours.
As part of our series of interviews with GenoMed4All partners, Marilena reflects on the role she’s fulfilled during the project and her hopes for its impact on advancing precision medicine for hematology after the project ends in June 2025.
Work package leadership and interdisciplinary collaborations
In GenoMed4All, I’ve been working as part of the team responsible for use case validation. Our focus was to assess the feasibility and clinical value of the GenoMed4All platform and its AI-driven tools in real-world clinical settings. This meant piloting the platform across various institutions and seeing how it held up, not just in terms of data sharing through federated learning, but also how applicable and effective the AI models were in supporting clinicians through different phases of the patient journey, from diagnosis to prognosis and treatment decisions.
We addressed three specific use cases: sickle cell disease (SCD), myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and multiple myeloma (MM). Each came with very different clinical and technological challenges; for example, sickle cell disease is hereditary, whereas the other two are not. All three are rare diseases, so data scarcity was a recurring issue.
To tackle these complexities, we worked hand in hand with clinicians. We started by identifying the unmet clinical needs for each use case — such as diagnosis, risk prediction and treatment decisions — and built our methodology around those needs. A big part of our role was supporting the standardization of data collection across sites, drafting protocols, harmonizing data and defining clinical outcomes in collaboration with both clinicians and technical partners.
At Humanitas, we were especially focused on bridging the clinical and technical worlds. It was important to ensure that the AI solutions developed were actually usable and relevant in a clinical context. For instance, we put a lot of effort into creating a unified, FAIR-aligned methodology for data standardization. We also activated new collaborations with European registries like ENROL and RADeep. Ultimately, we evaluated the performance of the federated AI models through real pilot trials, always with an eye on their clinical utility.
Impact on precision medicine for hematology
What excites me most about the work we’ve done as part of GenoMed4All is that it shows how technological innovation can genuinely make an impact in clinical practice. This isn’t just a research exercise, we were able to demonstrate that AI models can be integrated into actual clinical workflows, offering tangible benefits for patients.
By using a federated learning approach and building a privacy-preserving infrastructure, we were able to bring data-driven, personalised care to the forefront while fully respecting patient data privacy. The tools we developed enable a much more tailored and effective way to support clinical decision-making, and I believe that this kind of integration is key for the future of precision medicine.
Learnings from this 4-year journey
One of the biggest takeaways for me has been the importance of a truly multidisciplinary approach. The project brought together a diverse range of stakeholders with different backgrounds, and that diversity was fundamental to its success.
Another major lesson is that technological innovation should always be guided by clinical needs, not the other way around. For AI tools to be trusted and adopted, clinicians need to be involved right from the start. At the same time, technical partners need to understand the real-world clinical challenges they’re aiming to solve.
The legacy of GenoMed4All going forward
Looking ahead, I believe GenoMed4All leaves behind a strong and lasting legacy. We’ve laid the foundation for a federated, privacy-preserving infrastructure that connects hospitals and research centres across borders. We’ve also built a tight-knit community of institutions, researchers and clinicians who are motivated to keep pushing this work forward.
Thanks to the support of ERN-EuroBloodNet and other key networks, we’re already thinking about how to expand. We want to bring more centres into this effort, and we’re putting a strategy in place to grow this community. Ultimately, GenoMed4All is not just a project — it’s the beginning of something much bigger.