2021 D-Challenge Winner Announcement

04:45pm December 20, 2021
Ko-Wei Lin

News

The images and information are from the(sugar)science and dkNET academy:

The 2021 D-Challenge announced the winners on December 13, 2021! Congratulations to the D-Challenge winners! Thanks to all who helped make this a success, and thank you to all participants who used the rich ecosystem of online tools and data findable through dkNET to develop the Type 1 Diabetes hypotheses!

D-Challenge is a bioinformatics competition and a community research challenge designed to increase awareness and use of the public available online tools and data findable through dkNET to develop a compelling hypothesis about the biology, treatment or sequelae of Type 1 diabetes. Participants were from students to skilled bioinformaticians and data scientists. There were 58 participants and 27 global teams joining the D-Challenge around the word this year.

The goal in this year's challenge was to bring investigators across disciplines to apply their skills and passion to the problem of T1D: its biology, treatment and sequelae, through the use of a rich interconnected ecosystem of data tools and resources. The extensive resources and tools hosted through dkNET provide the opportunity to catalyze searches for novel pathways implicated in disease pathophysiology and / or identify new therapeutic targets. As a partner in the D-Challenge, dkNET provides access to these resources and tools in an easily available setting, fostering discovery by the broad community of investigators focused on T1D.

Entries were judged on the creative use of public tools, data, and knowledge resources to develop a compelling hypothesis regarding the biology, treatment, or sequelae of T1D. Participants were expected to use multiple on-line tools and platforms and to develop a plan as to how the hypothesis could be tested. The challenge focuses on in-silico development and testing and was not involve a wet lab component.

Let's congratulation to this year's winners! With collaboration and contribution from the research community, the Type 1 diabetes knowledgebase grows!

First Place: AY LAB Team at La Jolla Institute of Immunology California $20,000 award

Ferhat Ay, Joaquin Reyna, Abhijit Chakraborty, Nikhil Rao, Sourya Bhattacharyya

"Chromatin loops and expression QTL colocalization reveal novel gene targets for T1D-associated GWAS variants in immune cells"

Second Place and Young Investigator Award: 4 Science Team at MUSC, Harvard, Stanford, UCSF $15,000 award

Leonardo Ferreira, Nayara Leite, Zhe Liu, Kwat Medetgul-Ernar

"We discovered a distinct gene signature that characterizes virtually all the beta cells remaining in T1D patients while being almost absent in non-diabetics"

Outside T1D Award: Guan Lab Team at University of Michigan

Hanrui Zhang, Yiyang Nan, Siyi Du, Yuanfang Guan

"We proposed a solution for complete T1D progression risk monitoring by state-of-the-art survival model (GuanRank) and ML based on clinical meta-data including gene expression profiles and medical history"

Award for Interdisciplinary Science: UFDI Team at University of Florida Diabetes Institute

Melanic Shapiro, Leandro Balzano-Nogueira

"We hypothesized that T1D risk variants may promote ?-cell fragility by regulating the expression of genes involved in participation in immune processes and/or viral infection."