Hackathon in Leuven: Structural and Functional Genomics Team Meets Scientific Partners 

Turning ideas into code – and code into new directions for structural genomics

The Structural and Functional Genomics team from Sano – Tomasz Kościółek (team leader), Paweł Szczerbiak, Rund Tawfiq, Jakub Wojciechowski and Filip Schymik – has just returned from a highly productive working visit to Leuven, Belgium. Together with their long‑standing scientific partners, they focused on pushing forward joint projects in structural genomics and microbiome research.

This time, the team experimented with a new format: a “hackathon edition” of their collaboration meeting. Instead of limiting discussions to slides and theory, each promising idea was quickly turned into code and preliminary analyses, allowing the group to see first results within hours. According to the team, it was intense, but very productive, with rapid feedback loops between hypotheses, implementation and interpretation.

A special feature of the visit was the participation of Prof. Torsten Schwede, an internationally recognised expert in structural bioinformatics and current President of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Thanks to his expertise, Prof. Schwede helped the team stress-test their work against the expectations of the broader scientific community. As the team is building a large, shared data atlas, the discussions also focused on when its quality will be sufficient for confident use, and how agent‑based AI systems could be leveraged for fully interpretable analysis of this growing dataset in biomedical research.

By combining a hackathon‑style workflow with close interaction between partners, the meeting in Leuven showed how much can be achieved when concepts, code and people come together at the same time. For the Structural and Functional Genomics Group at Sano, it was not only a step forward in ongoing projects, but also a strong reinforcement of their international collaboration network.