Virtual Cell Challenge 2025

Join CRG’s effort at sending a competitive submission to the Virtual Cell Challenge!

We are looking for proactive, research-driven teammates to collaborate with us.

A couple of groups at CRG have already started to collaborate on this challenge for the past few weeks, and research is moving fast.
Therefore, we are organizing a larger scale collaborative hackathon.

Why join the Virtual Cell Challenge AND our team?

1. You will be part of a committed, energetic, and collaborative group at CRG.
2. You will access high-quality single-cell perturbation datasets specifically designed for model training and evaluation.
3. You will generate scientific impact: accelerate drug discovery, develop new strategies for disease modeling, and even write a publication.
4. You will showcase your research and compete for prestigious recognition and substantial cash and technology prizes.
5. You will collaborate and compete with leading scientists, computational biologists, and AI researchers from academia.

What is the Virtual Cell Challenge?

Understanding, predicting, and ultimately programming how cells respond to internal cues and external stimuli is a fundamental challenge in biology.
Advances in single-cell RNA-seq technologies now enable large-scale measurements of cellular responses to genetic and chemical perturbations, fueling this exciting era of predictive cellular modeling.
Virtual Cell Challenge is a recurring, open, community-driven challenge supported by the ARC institute aimed at evaluating and improving computational models that predict cellular responses to genetic or chemical perturbations.
Essentially, ARC institute aims at building a "CASP competition" for gene regulation. 
For the first edition, participants must predict the effects of unseen CRISPRi knockdowns in H1 human embryonic stem cells.
Using new experimental data generated for the Challenge, we are building models that predict scRNAseq profiles from CRISPRi target genes.
 
Full description of the challenge can be found [HERE] and publication in CELL COMMENTARY [HERE]

Whether you’re a computational biologist, a machine learning enthusiast, or know about gene regulation — your expertise is welcome and valued.

Please pick your preferred day [HERE] for our collaborative hackathon before July 23rd 

If you have any questions? Feel free to contact Mathys Grapotte (Notredame's lab)