Latvia is participating in a Europe-level discussion on the future of bioinformatics and health data at the ELIXIR All Hands 2026 meeting

From 8 to 10 June 2026, the 12th annual All Hands Meeting of ELIXIR – the European life sciences infrastructure for biological information – took place in Lyon, France. This flagship event brings together representatives from all ELIXIR Nodes, along with partners from academia and industry across Europe. It serves as a key platform for discussing recent achievements, shaping future strategies, and strengthening community-wide synergies across all areas of ELIXIR’s activity.

The ELIXIR All Hands 2026 programme shows how closely modern life-science research is now tied to data stewardship, trusted compute infrastructure, artificial intelligence and shared international standards. Over the course of three days, plenary sessions, workshops, and mini-symposia addressed the practical implementation of the FAIR principles, research data management, software quality and sustainability, federated computing, the use of health data in research, strengthening educational capacity, and the long-term development of ELIXIR services.

Health data is one of the most visible themes of All Hands 2026. In particular, the workshop “Bringing health data standards across Europe: From OMOP to GA4GH” focused on how Europe can better align clinical and health data standards, including the OMOP Common Data Model and Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) standards such as Beacon, Task Execution Service (TES)/Workflow Execution Service (WES), Phenopackets and Passports/AAI. This was an important discussion because genomics and molecular data already benefit from relatively mature standards, while clinical data across Europe often remain fragmented, complex, and the data is difficult to reuse in research.

Another session of great importance to Latvia was the workshop “Connecting Health Data Across Europe: How Can We Help Each Other?”, during which ELIXIR nodes shared their experiences regarding health data infrastructure, the management of sensitive data, compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), secure analytics environments, and discussed opportunities for collaboration in the context of the European Health Data Space (EHDS) and ELIXIR’s Human Data and Translational Research initiatives. In this session, Latvia was represented by the Tenured Professor Baiba Vilne of Rīga Stradiņš University, expected to serve as Head of the future Latvian ELIXIR Node, who was one of the speakers, giving a two-minute lightning talk on the country’s emerging health and omics data ecosystem, its existing assets and its main implementation challenges.

Latvia’s presentation emphasised that the country is still developing its ELIXIR node ecosystem, but it already has several resources that can be linked to the broader European infrastructure. These include the Latvian population genome database and the development of population genome reference resources, participation in the 1+ Million Genomes initiative, and several biobank-related activities, as well as the Centre for Precision Medicine in Pediatrics, which combines genomics, bioinformatics, diagnostics, biobanks, and clinical research. The Latvian research community is also increasingly utilising high-performance computing, artificial intelligence/machine learning, workflows compliant with FAIR principles, synthetic data, and privacy-preserving analytical approaches. 

At the same time, Latvia currently faces several practical challenges that many European countries share. To make health and omics data safe and useful for research, Latvia needs to strengthen governance and interoperability between hospital and research information systems, improve data quality and structured data capture, expand the adoption of common standards such as OMOP CDM, HL7 FHIR, SNOMED CT, LOINC and GA4GH, and develop secure national environments for the secondary use of sensitive data, federated analysis and large-scale omics processing.

The health data discussions at All Hands 2026 were closely linked to the broader development of digital research infrastructure. A mini-symposium on the ELIXIR Compute Platform explored how federated compute services can be connected to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation, EuroHPC and Europe’s AI Factories, giving researchers access to distributed and trusted computing capacity. A workshop on Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers examined how ELIXIR services can become more accessible through tools powered by large language models (LLM), while maintaining quality, trust and sustainability.

A workshop on large language models in life-science training looks at both the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence for preparing training materials and the risks of over-reliance on automated solutions. 

The closing part of the meeting looks ahead to ELIXIR’s high-impact projects for sensitive and high-value datasets, the infrastructure’s mid-term review and the planning of the 2029–2033 Scientific Programme. These discussions are highly relevant for Latvia because they will help define how Europe develops a trusted, interoperable and sustainable life-science data infrastructure in the coming years.

On 1 June 2025, Rīga Stradiņš University launched the project “RSU Participation in the Horizon Europe Programme” (project No. 1.1.1.5/3/25/I/014), which includes implementing one of Latvia’s new National Partnership and Action Plans under the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) framework — Latvia’s integration into ELIXIR. Participation in the All Hands Meeting helps Latvia adopt proven solutions more quickly, strengthen data stewardship and bioinformatics expertise, and become fully embedded in Europe’s health and life-science data space.