First hackathon held by the UCL Computational Cancer Collaboratorium

Participants from around the UK joined UCL’s new centre for innovation and enterprise, BaseKX, to pitch and solve problems in cancer using innovative computational techniques. Challenges spanned from image analysis to variant interpretation, with teams of attendees learning about the fundamental features of working with cancer data and different AI and modelling approaches from experts in the field.

 The hackathon was organised by UCL’s Computational Cancer Collaboratorium, a new centre coordinating the pioneering research conducted across the institute. The event supported multidisciplinary teams of clinicians, scientists and engineers to adopt and develop cutting-edge tools to tackle real-world problems.

Centre Co-Chair Dr Jamie Dean, who proposed and led the hackathon, said “It’s exciting to bring together such a diverse group of people to work on pressing problems in the field and give participants an insight into what it’s like working in multidisciplinary computational cancer research. Advances in computational methods have transformed cancer research in recent years and I hope that increasing interactions between experimental, clinical and computational researchers will bring about many more important advances in the future”.

The hackathon benefited from pitches of bold cancer research challenges for teams to address, pitched by experts in the field, including Consultant Neuroradiologist Dr Harpreet Hyare from University College London Hospitals. These challenges covered problems in clinical and fundamental cancer biology, ranging from image analysis to genomics.

Attendees were enthusiastic about the opportunities and challenges of the event. When speaking about how it went, Monika Gonka, a PhD student from York mentioned: “An excellent event! Well-organised, the atmosphere was great and I had the pleasure of working with a fantastic team. I am already looking forward to the next hackathon!”

Ryan Payton from Microsoft, whose team presented at the event shared their experience: “It was great to see an appetite and enthusiasm for collaboration between computer scientists and life scientists to tackle real challenges in the clinical world to make an impact. The Microsoft team learned a lot about possible new applications of our foundational AI models by engaging with participants new to this technology, thinking outside the box."