TECREANDO joined the global biobanking community at Europe Biobank Week (EBW) 2026, held from 19–22 May at the Prague Congress Centre in the Czech Republic. Jointly organised by BBMRI-ERIC (the pan-European Biobanking and BioMolecular resources Research Infrastructure) and ESBB (the European, Middle Eastern & African Society for Biopreservation and Biobanking), EBW is widely regarded as the most influential annual event for the international biobanking community. This year's edition brought together more than 750 biobankers, researchers, industry specialists and decision-makers from 49 countries, featuring 104 oral presentations and 155 poster sessions across four days of keynotes, parallel sessions, and workshops dedicated to the latest innovations in biobanking and life sciences. TMF e.V. + 3

Representing TECREANDO, Dr. Ioannis Vezakis presented the work "Essential Requirements for a Federated Biobank Infrastructure: BIO-STREAMS' Operational Implementation Across Six European Countries." The presentation explored how BIO-STREAMS, a Horizon Europe project within the OBEClust obesity research cluster, deploys federated infrastructure across seven sites in six European countries to address persistent challenges in biobank sustainability, interoperability, and stakeholder engagement.

The work outlined four essential requirements identified through operational deployment: a Distributed Node Bundle Architecture that ensures institutional data sovereignty across federated sites; CDISC SDTM Harmonisation through custom ontologies for cross-institutional data model compliance; a GDPR Article 26 Governance framework based on distributed joint-controller arrangements; and Tiered Data Sharing that leverages synthetic data generation to enable stratified access without compromising privacy.

By prioritising federation over centralisation and standardisation that enables collaboration without data movement, BIO-STREAMS offers actionable frameworks supporting European Health Data Space (EHDS) implementation. As a member of the EU Obesity Cluster (ObeClust), the project continues to share its architecture with fellow initiatives across Europe's research ecosystem.