Clinnova, a collaborative initiative involving France, Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, is dedicated to unlocking the power of precision medicine through data federation, standardization, and interoperability. This European Greater Region initiative seeks to create an interoperable European standard using artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to enhance healthcare outcomes and efficiency. Key components include multidisciplinary research centers, a federated biobanking strategy, a digital health innovation platform, and a federated AI strategy. It targets inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid diseases, and multiple sclerosis (MS), emphasizing data quality to develop AI algorithms for personalized treatment and translational research. The IHU Strasbourg (Institute of Minimal-invasive Surgery) has the lead in this initiative to develop the federated learning (FL) proof of concept (POC) that will serve as a foundation for advancing AI in healthcare. At its core, Clinnova-MS aims to enhance MS patient care by using FL to develop more accurate models that detect disease progression, guide interventions, and validate digital biomarkers across multiple sites. This technical report presents insights and key takeaways from the first cross-border federated POC on MS segmentation of MRI images within the Clinnova framework. While our work marks a significant milestone in advancing MS segmentation through cross-border collaboration, it also underscores the importance of addressing technical, logistical, and ethical considerations to realize the full potential of FL in healthcare settings.

To date, several methods have been developed to explain deep learning algorithms for classification tasks. Recently, an adaptation of two of such methods has been proposed to generate instance-level explainable maps in a semantic segmentation scenario, such as multiple sclerosis (MS) lesion segmentation. In the mentioned work, a 3D U-Net was trained and tested for MS lesion segmentation, yielding an F1 score of 0.7006, and a positive predictive value (PPV) of 0.6265. The distribution of values in explainable maps exposed some differences between maps of true and false positive (TP/FP) examples. Inspired by those results, we explore in this paper the use of characteristics of lesion-specific saliency maps to refine segmentation and detection scores. We generate around 21000 maps from as many TP/FP lesions in a batch of 72 patients (training set) and 4868 from the 37 patients in the test set. 93 radiomic features extracted from the first set of maps were used to train a logistic regression model and classify TP versus FP. On the test set, F1 score and PPV were improved by a large margin when compared to the initial model, reaching 0.7450 and 0.7817, with 95% confidence intervals of [0.7358, 0.7547] and [0.7679, 0.7962], respectively. These results suggest that saliency maps can be used to refine prediction scores, boosting a model's performances.

In the past years, AlphaFold has revolutionised protein science. This Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool was trained on protein data collected by life scientists for over 50 years, and is able to predict the 3D shape of proteins with high accuracy. Its success prompted the modelling of an astounding 215 million proteins last year, providing insights into the shapes of almost any protein. This is particularly interesting for proteins that have not been studied experimentally, a complex and time-consuming process. "There are now many sources of protein information, containing valuable insights into how proteins evolve and work" says Joana Pereira, the leader of the study.

As a world market leader in crop protection, we help farmers to counter threats and ensure enough safe, nutritious, affordable food for all – while minimizing the use of land and other agricultural inputs. Syngenta Crop Protection keeps plants safe from planting to harvesting. From the moment a seed is planted through to harvest, crops need to be protected from weeds, insects, and diseases as well as droughts and floods, heat, and cold. Syngenta Crop Protection is headquartered in Switzerland. This role is based in Basel, Switzerland or Jealott's Hill, UK.

Syngenta Seeds is one of the world's largest developers and producers of seed for farmers, commercial growers, retailers and small seed companies. Syngenta seeds improve the quality and yields of crops. High-quality seeds ensure better and more productive crops, which is why farmers invest in them. Advanced seeds help mitigate risks such as disease and drought and allow farmers to grow food using less land, less water and fewer inputs. Syngenta Seeds brings farmers more vigorous, stronger, resistant plants, including innovative hybrid varieties and biotech crops that can thrive even in challenging growing conditions.

The Position In Roche s Pharmaceutical Research and Early Development organisation (pRED), we make transformative medicines for patients in order to tackle some of the world's toughest unmet healthcare needs. At pRED, we are united by our mission to transform science into medicines. Together, we create a culture defined by curiosity, responsibility and humility, where our talented people are empowered and inspired to bring forward extraordinary life-changing innovation at speed. This position is located in Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD), a department within Small Molecule research, where the computer-aided discovery of chemical starting points and further optimization towards clinical candidates is the primary focus. To ensure excellence in drug design, we push the scientific boundaries in key areas of CADD, implement and democratize new computational tools, and advocate a digital mindset across the organization.

Welcome to the OCTLab, the OCT research group for OCT technology, Virtual Ophthalmology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Basel. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a new, non-invasive imaging technology that uses laser waves to detect pathologies in diseases as age related macular degeneration (AMD), glaucoma, diabetes, multiple sclerosis (MS), tumors of the eye or brain. The OCTlab does applied research and Quality Assurance Studies in the field of optical coherence tomography and targets to save human vision. The University of Basel was founded in 1460 and is the oldest University in Switzerland.

A few months ago I wrote about how we built our wellness app experiment called "Kubecoin". It's a side project, a type of hobby app that we built to take to developer events, to challenge participants to walk more, and to offer an immersive taste of IBM Cloud technology. We updated the app, and renamed it CloudCoins (because it is built on more technology than just Kubernetes) and we're experimenting with it at the Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2018 in Basel, Switzerland, this week. It is built for iPhone and Android. CloudCoins is a mobile app, backed by a blockchain system that anonymously converts participants' steps into a cryptocurrency, as they walk around the conference.

" I'm intrigued by the general trend towards empowering individuals to share their data in a secure and controlled environment. Democratisation of data in this way has to be the future. Imagine what we will be able to do in decades to come, when individuals have access to their complete healthcare records in electronic form, paired with high quality data from genomics, epigenetics, microbiome, imaging, activity and lifestyle profiles, etc., supported by a platform that enables individuals to share all or parts of their data with partners of their choice, for purposes they care about, in return for services they value – very exciting! I have interviewed Bryn Roberts, Global Head of Operations for Roche Pharmaceutical Research & Early Development, and Site Head in Basel. We talked about using AI and Data Analytics in Pharmaceutical Research.

What does the youngest chief executive in Big Pharma want? When Vas Narasimhan, 41, took the helm of drug giant Novartis in February, he'd already put the project in motion. Novartis scouts were dispatched to visit air traffic control towers and the Swiss electrical grid to see how other industries dealt with torrents of data. Working with McKinsey's QuantumBlack unit, they built a software system called Nerve that not only keeps track of every data point on all 550 clinical trials testing Novartis drugs, but also uses analytic software to predict potential hiccups in the execution of those studies. Soon Narasimhan will be able to walk into mission control at the company's Basel, Switzerland, headquarters and call up whatever information he needs in an instant. "When you look at history, it takes the medical establishment 50 to 75 years to actually change how we do clinical studies," Narasimhan says.