Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds immense potential to transform healthcare outcomes by enabling more accurate diagnostics, personalized treatment pathways, and timely clinical interventions. However, a persistent lack of access to high-quality, AI-ready data remains one of the most critical bottlenecks. Much of this data is locked within hospital silos, and a combination of technical and regulatory constraints continues to reinforce these access barriers.
The launch of the Sada-Santé research project was officially announced in a joint declaration by French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi on February 20, 2026. The project is a partnership between the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the French Health Data Hub.
As Emmanuel Bacry says: “With the deployment of the European Health Data Space (EHDS)—a major step forward for research in Europe—one question remains: how can we work effectively with AI on data from different countries? Keeping the data in each country and using Federated Learning? This is currently the most widespread solution, but it is costly and time-consuming to deploy, and it significantly complicates the work of research teams. Centralizing the data in one place? This is appealing on paper, but rarely feasible in practice, given the high security risks and sovereignty concerns.
In this context, the Indian open-source architecture DEPA (https://depa.world), developed by iSPIRT, provides a concrete solution to these challenges by guaranteeing data security, confidentiality, and traceability.
Specifically, for the Sada-Santé project, the chosen approach involves creating a secure DEPA environment deployed within the Health Data Platform itself, enabling Indian data to be hosted alongside French data in France.
The project will focus on several research cases, including an initial investigation in cardiology.
This partnership represents a world first in research and international cooperation, poised to inspire numerous applications, particularly with a view to deploying EHDS in Europe.”
Results:
- MoU between the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the French Health Data Hub;
- Sada-Santé will be deloyed through different use cases, including cardiology.