Date: July 12 – 16, 2026
We are excited to announce the 2nd Health Privacy Challenge, returning as a part of CAMDA 2026 at ISMB Conference. The challenge focuses on developing and evaluating privacy-preserving methods for synthetic gene expression data, combining advances in computational biology with privacy risk assessment.
CAMDA will be hosted as part of ISMB Conference in Washington DC, on July 12-16, 2026.
Participants are invited to join the challenge by competing in one of the following tasks:
- Track I – Blue Team: develop novel privacy-preserving methods for generating synthetic bulk gene expression datasets that retain meaningful biological signal and utility.
- Track I – Red Team: design robust and realistic membership inference attack methods to rigorously assess and expose potential privacy risks in selected synthetic data generators submitted to the Health Privacy Challenge 2025.
- Track II – Single-cell Explorative: Develop innovative privacy-preserving methodologies tailored specifically to generate synthetic single-cell gene expression datasets.
Join the Challenge
Register at ELSA Benchmark Platform to get started and more information, and follow CAMDA Health Privacy Forum for questions and upcoming announcements!
Key Dates
- January 2026: Submissions open for all tracks.
- May 4th, 2026: Method/data submission deadline for all tracks
- May 7, 2026: CAMDA extended abstract submission deadline for both tracks (ALL TEAMS!)
- Jul 12-16, 2026: CAMDA Conference @ ISMB 2026 in Washington D.C., USA
The teams with the best solutions will be invited to present their methods at the CAMDA Conference at ISMB 2026.
This challenge is a collaboration by EMBL, CISPA, and the University of Helsinki, with the support of Barcelona CVC and NVIDIA in the context of ELSA.