Biohackathon 2026
Scotland's first student-led biohackathon. 48 hours at the University of Edinburgh, 20–22 March 2026, run by PRIMED Edinburgh.
What went well
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350 applications for 100+ places
Real demand
Applications came from across the UK. About one in three and a half got a place.
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7 challenge providers
Real problems
Challenges came from companies and labs, from microscopy to fungal growth media.
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48% from outside the University of Edinburgh
Mixed teams
Biology, physics, computing, chemistry, medicine and business in teams of four to six. For many, it was their first hackathon.
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16 judges and mentors
Lasting links
Teams worked alongside people from academia, industry and venture. New collaborations and co-founder pairings followed, sponsors flagged internships, and several participants asked to help run the next one.
“Given the 48h window, the outcomes were downright impressive.”
“Most have never participated in a hackathon before, and most have enjoyed working intensively in an interdisciplinary team over the 48h.”
“This was such an incredible event — I'm already looking forward to next year's one.”
Winners
- Winner Protein filaments challenge
Filament Fillies
A web tool that finds and tracks filaments in time-lapse microscopy of living yeast cells.
Devpost - Winner Bio-innovation hub resource allocation challenge
Deap Crash
Decision support for funding committees: test allocations under tight budgets and produce briefs that keep facts, assumptions and model outputs apart.
Devpost - Winner Best business idea in biology and biotech
Phoenix
Automatically tunes growth media for the best cell growth, using genome-scale metabolic models.
Devpost - Winner Best use of AI agents on Arm
Wave~Breakers
Sound and microgravity shape tumour cells into 3D spheroids, for drug screening closer to real tumours.
Devpost - Winner Hackiest hack
Cween
Upload a fungal protein file and get a metabolic model in the browser that predicts growth under your bioreactor conditions.
Devpost
Runners-up
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Protein Filaments
A pipeline that automates finding protein filaments in microscopy images.
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Filament detection
Benchmarks ways to segment, detect and measure filaments, including against Ilastik.
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FilamentTrack
Temporal deep learning that segments filaments in budding yeast, in 2D and 3D.
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Wav.io
Simulates sound fields from a 64-transducer array to assemble brain tumour spheroids into tumoroids.
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Growing Magnets
Uses sound and biology to grow magnets from common iron materials instead of rare earths.
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Predict
Builds a metabolic model from a genome and suggests growth media for filamentous fungi.
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MetaFLUX
Turns fungal protein data into a metabolic model to estimate growth, biomass and suitable media.
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GEMtimize
An app that builds genome-scale metabolic models from protein files and runs flux balance analysis.
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MediaOpt
Digital twins of fungal metabolism that simulate growth on adjustable media.
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The Sugar Spinner
A hybrid model of levan polymerisation, pairing reaction kinetics with simulations of single chains.
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Sugar Spinning: a plant solution
A plant-based answer to the sugar-spinning challenge.
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No Human Intelligence
Scores biotech hubs and compares funding strategies in simulation.
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BioParrot
Voice and camera capture with a language model to create and manage lab records.
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AI SLOPping Lab Assistant
A hands-free, voice-activated lab assistant for Mac and Raspberry Pi.
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Shadow
A privacy-first AI assistant with a UK regulatory pathway checker and a meeting note-taker.
Thank you
Biohackathon 2026 was organised by PRIMED Edinburgh, a volunteer team of PhD students and postdocs. The 2027 biohackathon builds on what they started.
Organising team
- Ian Yang
- Apple Chew
- Saurav Sreejith
- Connor Aylesworth
- Hari Shyamapant
- Zunaira Aman
- Javi Mazo Gonzalez-Choren
- Adriana Cusi
- Horace Chan
- Elena Hein
- Jinxuan Cui
Advisers and judges
- Peter Swain
- Davide Michieletto
- Tanmay Gupta
Workshops
- Lysimachos Zografos
- Alasdair Ivens
- Mike Wallis