On 29 April, the H2020-funded VirtualBrainCloud project (TVB_Cloud) held its General Assembly meeting online, which was followed by a Technical Coordination meeting on 30 April. The TVB_Cloud meetings were chaired by Prof. Petra Ritter, who is leading the project, and was attended by over 50 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 meetings. Several members of the newly-established Technical Advisory Board (TAB) also participated, including Magali Haas of Cohen Veterans Bioscience, Per Oster of EOSC-Hub and Thomas Schulthess of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.
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, alongside updates describing the legal and ethical work on patient privacy 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. Data protection is of paramount importance to TVB_Cloud, so the final part of the GA meeting was devoted to discussions on the development of a Trusted Cloud framework for TVB_Cloud, including technical and infrastructure requirements and security aspects.
On 30 April, the inaugural TVB_Cloud Technical Coordination meeting started with a question: how can we facilitate data interoperability, whilst retaining the richness (and capturing the heterogeneity) of clinical datasets? During this meeting, attendees were introduced to Indoc Research, a Canadian not-for-profit company which has been subcontracted to provide technical coordination services for TVB_Cloud. Representatives from Indoc and Codemart (an SME partner on the TVB_Cloud project) provided an update on the methodologies and processes that are being used to develop the TVB_Cloud platform. These presentations were followed by a Q&A session, as well as discussions on how best to reach out to policymakers, regulators and other key stakeholder groups. Drawing the meetings to a close, Prof. Ritter emphasised the importance of finding effective ways to rapidly and securely re-use health data, facilitating the development of platforms such as TVB_Cloud for the benefit of patients and citizens. More information on TVB_Cloud can be found on the project website:
