The Cloud4SAMS consortium met on Tuesday May 6 and Wednesday May 7, 2025 for a workshop at Inserm headquarters in Paris. This project aims to develop a digital space for accessing and analyzing microbiome and health data. The goal of the workshop was to identify and prioritize feature developments for the secure Cloud4SAMS platform, through a detailed presentation of the needs of the various use cases identified.
The first half-day was devoted to the presentation of four use cases:
- the Le French Gut and METACARDIS projects, dedicated to the study of intestinal microbiota;
- a project to apply artificial intelligence to vaginal microbiota data, supported by the AuBI platform;
- and finally, a use case for a public metagenomic and multi-omics data bank, at the MetaGenoPolis laboratory.
The presentation of these use cases highlighted the technical (integration, reproduction and analysis of large volumes of data, use of AI resources, etc.) and regulatory (sharing of sensitive data, consideration of local regulatory constraints, etc.) requirements for the development of Cloud4SAMS.
The second half-day was an opportunity to present the various advances made in the development of Cloud4SAMS, notably in terms of its secure digital environment (Biosphere cloud from the Institut Français de Bioinformatique (IFB) and Arcana secure bubbles from INRIA) and data management and access.
In addition, as one of the axes of the Cloud4SAMS project is dedicated to the development of a catalog of digital resources, the workshop was also an opportunity to announce the creation of a new work group within the IFB’s “Microbiology” community: the group catalog resources for the analysis of (meta)genomic data in microbiology. Its aim is to bring together participants from the various microbiology projects at the IFB (Cloud4SAMS, MUDIS4LS, ABRomics, etc.) and elsewhere, in order to build up a state of the art of the databases, methods and tools needed to analyze metagenomic data (initially).
The first meeting of the work group took place on Friday May 16, 2025.
The Cloud4SAMS project, co-led by the Institut Français de Bioinformatique and INRAE, is funded by the PEPR SAMS, piloted by INRAE and Inserm, as part of the French government’s France 2030 investment plan. To find out more about the project, watch the video presentation of Cloud4SAMS by project co-leaders Claudine Médigue and Nicolas Pons, broadcast at the first PEPR SAMS Scientific Day lashttps://pepr-sams.fr/t February.