At FEUGA, we undertake a fundamental role in the new Horizon Europe project, HEREDITARY. This four-year initiative by the European Union focuses on optimizing disease detection, treatment response, and exploring medical knowledge in neurodegenerative and intestinal microbiome disorders, aiming to revolutionize the approach to these health issues by integrating multimodal health data.

In the project task organization, FEUGA will lead Work Package 8, dedicated to communication, dissemination, intellectual property (IP), and innovation. At the foundation, we will develop a strategy and action plan that the consortium can apply to better promote the project’s achievements and disseminate them among stakeholders, ensuring their sustainability beyond the project’s completion. This way, we will ensure knowledge transfer among the project, its stakeholders, other researchers, and the general population.

• How will HEREDITARY achieve its objectives?

The project seeks to establish a robust, interoperable, reliable, and secure framework for integrating multimodal health data, including genetic information. This framework will be designed to comply with transnational privacy policies, ensuring the confidentiality of information. This approach will enable the linking of various sources of clinical, genomic, and environmental data on a large scale. Semantic integration of multimodal data and the learning and analysis platform will play a crucial role in identifying new risk factors and treatment responses.

The HEREDITARY consortium comprises 18 partners from various European countries, with the University of Padua (UNIPD) assuming the role of coordinator. The project entails international collaboration among Italy, Bulgaria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the United States, Portugal, and Spain. At the Kick Off Meeting held on January 25th and 26th in Padua, partners established the initial steps for this ambitious project. At FEUGA, we presented the initial ideas regarding the communication strategy, dissemination, and intellectual property management that will be implemented over the next 4 years.

The project’s commitment is to change the way health and genetic data are handled, unlocking knowledge that was previously impossible to obtain.