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.

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.

When & How

The event will be full virtual.

Major dates include:

4 January 2021: Kick-off call with organisers, mentors, and students
15 January – 15 February: Hackathon running (weekly touch-points between mentors and students to provide advice and check progress)
15 February: Review call with organisers
25 February: Report with feedback and assignment of prizes

We want to speed up the process.

We will assess the winner according to four criteria:

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

The winning team will

Contribute in a publication with WBP
Be a guest at a WBP webinar / blog
Receive a symbolic monetary prize

Guidance on potential scientific questions and datasets

Challenge: Students will have the freedom to choosetheir own scientific question. The only requirement is that it has to be linked to sex and gender differences to advance science and precision medicine.

Datasets

We propose to leverage publicly available datasets, which can be easily downloaded and pre-processed by the organisers or the participants. Ideally, 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)

Contact us

If you’re interested in participating in the WBP Hackathon, please fill out this Google Form, and to support the initiative or connect with the team, reach out to hackathonwbp@womensbrainproject.com.