Overview - Health (2026)

HEALTH PRIVACY CHALLENGE - CAMDA 2026

📢 The Health Privacy Challenge returns for 2026! 

Following the successful completion of the first run of the Health Privacy Challenge in 2025, we are excited to announce the second run! This edition includes extended baseline methods and a longer implementation period for your solutions.

The challenge runs once again within Conference on Critical Assessment of Massive Data Analysis (CAMDA) @ ISMB 2026.

 

🔗 Quick Links

• 💬 CAMDA Health Privacy Challenge Google Groups 

• 👩🏻‍💻 Github Starter Package Repo 

• 🫐🍅 The Health Privacy Challenge 2025

 

🎢 Get started 

The challenge consists of two tracks: 

Track I: Featuring bulk gene expression data  

Track I is designed in a “Blue Team (🫐) vs Red Team (🍅)” scheme: 

• The blue teams develop privacy-preserving methods to generate synthetic gene expression datasets, 

• The red teams launch membership inference attacks (MIA) against selected blue teams’ solutions from the Health Privacy Challenge 2025.

 

While we encourage implementing Differential Privacy (DP), it is not required in order to participate in the challenge. We invite the participants to advance the field by developing,

• 🚀 novel privacy preserving generative methods that can mitigate privacy risks while preserving biological insights,

• 🚀trustworthy and realistic membership inference methods that can inform the community of the potential privacy risks.

 

Track II: Featuring single-cell gene expression data  

Track II follows a Blue Team (🫐) scheme but maintains a free-form structure. Participants are encouraged to explore both the privacy and utility of synthetic single-cell RNA-seq data. This may include:

• developing privacy-preserving generative methods that balance privacy and utility,

• investigating privacy risks within synthetic scRNA-seq datasets,

• proposing evaluation metrics to assess utility and privacy in a multi-sample setting.

While the Blue Team structure provides a foundation, participants have the freedom to probe privacy risks in synthetic single-cell RNA-seq datasets and innovate methods for safeguarding donor-level privacy.

 

🎢 Participation 

In order to successfully participate in the challenge, the participants must,

• Register through ELSA benchmark platform to access the challenge datasets. We recommend you to register using an organizational email if possible. 

• After registering, navigate to Blue Team, Red Team or Track II page to create a team as a member. Once the team is created, they can use the team-specific invite link to invite other members to join. 

• (🫐,🍅) Submit their methods (codes and relevant files) through the ELSA Benchmark Website, under the respective team page  by the method submission deadline. They will overall have one benchmark submission.

• Submit a CAMDA extended abstract that details the submitted method through the ISMB 2026 submission system. 

We provide a Github Starter Package Repo that includes baselines methods and evaluation metrics for both teams is provided to the participants. More details about the baseline methods, participation rules, submission files and timeline can be found in the repo.

Connect with us through CAMDA Health Privacy Challenge Google Groups for questions, discussions and to follow upcoming announcements.

 

🏆 Evaluation

The teams with the best solutions will be determined based on multiple criteria, including,

• 🎯leaderboard ranking (Track I only),

• 💡novelty of methods,

• 🌱generation of novel insights into privacy-preservation in biology. 

Therefore, we strongly encourage the participants to submit their extended abstracts to be evaluated even if they might not have achieved a high ranking on the leaderboards.

 

The winners of each task will be invited to present their methods at the CAMDA Conference at ISMB 2026 in Washington D.C.

⏳ Timeline

📍December 2025: Submissions open for both tracks. 

• Please make sure to adhere to the guideline carefully to avoid invalidating your submission

• The teams that do not follow the above criteria will not be considered in the final evaluation. 

📍May 2026: Benchmark method submission deadline for both tracks. 

• All participants must have a benchmark method submissions by the method submission deadline. 

📍May 2026: CAMDA extended abstract submission deadline for both tracks (ALL TEAMS!).  

• All participants must submit a CAMDA extended abstract by the CAMDA submission deadline. For consideration for oral presentations, all teams must submit a CAMDA extended abstract, that describes the methods they participated in benchmark method submission, through ISMB 2026 submission system. 

 

👥 Organization Team  

The Health Privacy Challenge is designed as a collaborative effort between European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and the University of Helsinki with the support of Barcelona Computer Vision Center (CVC) within the context of ELSA Project.  

 

We invite contributions from members of the computational biology, privacy and all relevant interdisciplinary communities, aiming to create new bridges between these fields. We are looking forward to engaging with you and working together to deepen our understanding of privacy in health care.  🤗

Good luck🌟