Cell Culture Hackathon
Monomer Bio, San Francisco, California
Fifty scientists, lab robots and one task: onboard a new cell line inside twenty-four hours. The winning team closed the loop from image to next protocol to run.
The format was chosen because protocol work is difficult to demonstrate in conventional settings, where it resembles document editing. Placed next to a robot under a deadline, the bottleneck becomes visible: the step between an observation and the next protocol is performed by a person, and usually the following day.
Participants worked with lab robots, liquid handlers and imaging hardware supplied by the organisers. Elnora provided the protocol layer, generating and adapting wet-lab steps as each team's experiments changed.
The winning entry ran a closed loop with no human in it. A robot imaged a live culture, the images were assessed, Elnora planned the next protocol from that assessment, and the robot executed it.
The event was the fifth in a Bay Area series on AI, science and hardware, run with Worldwide Studios, Monomer Bio, Opentrons, Cephla, Novel Bio, PyLabRobot, the SF Hardware Meetup and Bay Area Lab Automators.
