On 7 and 8 October 2026, partners from across Europe gathered at the European Heart House in Sophia Antipolis, France, to launch CHAIN, a European flagship initiative for trustworthy AI in cardiovascular care. Pontegra was represented by Gokce Banu Laleci Erturkmen, Tuncay Namli and Ali Anil Sinaci.
CHAIN is coordinated by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and co-funded by the EU4Health programme. Over three years, it brings together 53 partners from 20 countries to turn Europe’s fragmented cardiovascular AI landscape into a trusted, connected ecosystem. This is built around CardioData@EU, a federated platform aligned with the European Health Data Space, and six real-world use cases that range from population risk prediction to ECG triage and cardiac imaging.
CHAIN is the first European Commission supported project for Pontegra, and we see it as a great achievement for our company. We are very proud to be part of this consortium and excited to start working with our partners.
Pontegra’s role in CHAIN
Pontegra leads Work Package 5, which delivers the FAIR AI Repository: a single, machine-processable access point for validated, deployment-ready cardiology AI. Our work includes the repository portal and catalogue, the AI Passport that records each model’s lifecycle, and the pipelines that bring AI tools into the repository.
We also contribute to the data and deployment foundations of the project:
- Leading the data quality assessment toolkit, with a focus on HL7 FHIR datasets
- Co-leading the ETL toolkit that harmonises local data to OMOP CDM and HL7 FHIR
- Leading the AI monitoring service, which tracks performance, drift and bias of deployed models
- Contributing to infrastructure design, use case specifications, federated learning, the open call and capacity building across eight work packages in total
Pontegra at the CHAIN kick-off
Trustworthy AI for cardiovascular care · European Heart House, Sophia Antipolis
The kickoff gave our team the chance to meet the consortium, align with the use case leaders and technical partners, and discuss how the pieces of CHAIN will fit together. We look forward to the next three years.
Learn more about the project at www.chain-flagship.eu.
The CHAIN project is co-funded by the European Union’s EU4Health programme under Grant Agreement No. 101314833. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or HaDEA.