WBP Challenge

Create / Decide / Find

A global hackathon sponsored and organised by the Women’s Brain Project (WBP) to advance the understanding of sex and gender differences for precision medicine. The event took place in January / February 2021.

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Participants

Individual students
Self-organizing groups
Researchers

Basic requirements: experience in data analysis, basic coding skills, proficient in MS Office.

Mentors

Researchers
Professors
Industry sponsors

Basic requirements: experience in the field of precision medicine, experience in guidance/coaching teams, interest in sex and gender differences and bias in technology for healthcare.

Projects

The projects were assessed according to four criteria:

Innovative solution proposed
Ability to work in teams
Self-organisation
Alignment with WBP mission

Guidance on potential scientific questions and datasets

Challenge: Students had the freedom to choose their own scientific question. The only requirement was that it had to be linked to sex and gender differences to advance science and precision medicine. The successful projects included the topics of ADHD, maternal mental health and organ-on-a-chip technology.

Datasets

The concept was to leverage publicly available datasets, which can be easily downloaded and pre-processed by the organisers or the participants. Data should be provided in the following form:

Set of matrices (dataframes) containing patient molecular profiles or associations, on matrix per type
Sample annotation table, containing any useful description of samples (e.g., clinical information), with sample
IDs used in the dataframes

Examples

The Cancer Genome Atlas:It contains multiomics data and clinical data for 33 cancers
The Genotype-Tissue Expression:It contains genotype and expression of tissues of healthy donors
OpenFDA:APIs and raw download access to structured datasets, including adverse events, drug products labeling, and recall enforcement reports
CPRD:Real-world retrospective and prospective public health and clinical studies
Epidemiological studies:Networks of comorbidity relationships in entire populations (Jensen et al. 2014: Hidalgo et al. 2009), also stratified by sex (Wastergaard et al. 2019)