On 22 April, the H2020-funded VirtualBrainCloud project (TVB_Cloud) held its General Assembly meeting online, summarising recent project developments and discussing upcoming plans. Chaired by Prof. Petra Ritter, who is leading the project, the meeting was attended by over 40 project participants, including representatives from the 17 institutions and organisations that make up the TVB_Cloud consortium. Jean Georges (Executive Director) and Angela Bradshaw (Project Officer) represented Alzheimer Europe at the meeting.
The primary objective of TVB_Cloud is to create a decision support system for clinicians, formed around a cloud platform for personalised brain simulations based on high-quality, multidisciplinary clinical data, encompassing EEG and MRI scans, -omics and blood-based biomarker data. This decision support system will enhance the early diagnosis, prognosis and personalised treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, with an initial focus on Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
During the TVB_Cloud General Assembly (GA) meeting, TVB_Cloud workpackage leaders provided summaries of ongoing activities on data processing and FAIRification, the construction of AD disease progression models, computational aspects of personalised, multiscale brain simulations, and the software development that underlies these activities. Progress updates were provided on a number of important deliverables that will be completed in the coming months, including a list of candidate mechanisms that could be used in personalised brain simulations. The next GA will be hosted in September.