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)