Hackathons May Accelerate Scientific Discovery, Study Finds

From interdisciplinary teams to multi-institutional partnerships, collaborations in research have become commonplace. However, these interactions are often made up of siloed teams who pass information along a pipeline rather than operating cohesively. In a new study, researchers have shown how hackathons, or other crowdsourcing events, may provide a good strategy for building bridges over the traditional divides of research partnerships and accelerate scientific discovery.

The study, published in Genome Research, follows the results of a hackathon hosted by the University of Notre Dame, the H3Africa Bioinformatics Network and IBM Research Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa. The week-long event pulled together a group of 23 researchers from eight African countries to analyze unpublished data of several isolates of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. The hackathon participants were asked to assess the potential of using this information to predict the parasite’s ability to develop drug resistance to artemisinin, a preferred treatment for malaria.

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