Khalil Roy | Expert Innovation Officer
Swiss Biobanking
Khalil Roy is Innovation Officer at the Swiss Biobanking Platform and founder of Vennes Data Systems, where he builds deterministic, auditable semantic infrastructure for clinical research. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Aalto University, awarded for his dissertation on explorable information spaces, and has spent the past decade working on discovery problems across Swiss and European research infrastructures.
His current work focuses on Messier, an open-source multilingual medical entity linking engine designed to make Swiss biobank collections findable across French, German, Italian and English.
Appearances:
BioTechX EU Day 2 @ 16:30
From Findable to Usable: Multilingual Disease Normalisation at the Point of Deposit
Swiss Biobanking’s national biosample catalogue, NExT, makes over 100 biobanks visible to researchers but few of them are willing to actually upload their sample data. Depositing is unpaid work, and because disease information is entered as free text across four national languages, the deposited data cannot be consistently queried, aggregated or compared anyway. Effort in, no value out.
This talk presents what Swiss Biobanking is doing to invert that calculation: a curation interface, built into the deposit workflow, that maps free-text disease mentions onto a standard ontology as they are entered.
Behind it sits Messier, an open-source, fully on-premise entity-linking system. It contributes no new algorithm; it makes an existing one deployable under Swiss data-protection law, where cloud LLMs are disqualified by design.
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