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Advancing Research Through Collaboration: EPND and PHEMS in Focus

Last week I had the good fortune to represent Aridhia at meetings with two of the European research consortia the company is a part of: EPND and PHEMS.

Monday – Madrid

Retiro Park, Madrid

Madrid was the first stop on my trip, to attend the annual conference of EPND. They are:

[…] a consortium of multidisciplinary educators, clinicians, researchers, and scientists committed to revolutionising scientific breakthroughs in the effort to diagnose, treat, and prevent neurodegenerative diseases.

EPND has a partnership with one of our customers, the AD Data Initiative. The Aridhia DRE provides the underlying platform of their AD Workbench, and we have been working with the EPND team to make it interoperable with their data catalogue. Registered EPND users can now move seamlessly between the two platforms, and will soon be able to submit data access requests for datasets hosted on the AD Workbench from the EPND catalogue.

The conference offered the technical team the opportunity to update the wider group on this progress, and it was encouraging to hear the senior leadership of EPND reiterate their belief that this type of integration will help drive collaboration across the research community. It was also good to hear about the progress being made in onboarding new research cohorts on to the EPND platform, and the discussions around how more can be incentivised to sign up.

Wednesday – Rotterdam

View from Erasmus MC, Rotterdam

After a too short stay in Madrid, it was on to Rotterdam for a PHEMS meeting. Where EPND focuses on diseases that primarily impact the elderly, PHEMS is a Europe-wide consortium of paediatric hospitals that:

[…] aims to revolutionize the way health data is managed and utilized across Europe. This project is particularly focused on addressing the challenges posed by privacy concerns and the complexity of data sharing due to varying interpretations of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). By developing a decentralized and open health data ecosystem, PHEMS strives to facilitate easier access to health data, thereby advancing federated health data analysis and creating services for generating shareable synthetic datasets.

Appropriately enough, the PHEMS consortium is at an earlier stage of its development than EPND, and I attended the meeting to discuss the scope of the PHEMS federated network MVP.

Aridhia’s contribution to this is the Federated Node, an open-source component that allows users to run federated tasks on remote data, and the first use case for the federated network is to allow members of the consortium to share clinical benchmarking data. We will be collaborating with our partners in PHEMS over the next six months to make this a reality.

And with that it was back to the airport and home to Glasgow, to end a very positive trip which showcased the impact that our products, and our customers and partners, are making on a diverse range of challenges.

November 5, 2024

 

ross

Ross joined the Aridhia Product Team in January 2022. He is the Product Owner for FAIR Data Services, and Aridhia's open source federation project. He works with our customers to understand their needs, and with our Development Team to introduce new features and improve our products. Outside of work, he likes to go hill walking and is slowly working his way through Scotland's Munros.