Assay-A-Thon | Building an Experimental Validation Toolkit for AI-Enabled Discovery
Join us to develop prototypes and assays that meet the demands of AI-enabled discovery, then compete for a fellowship to experimentally validate your work using Litmus Science’s cloud lab infrastructure.
The Problem: Discovery has outpaced validation in AI-enabled Life Sciences.
AI models now propose targets, binders and structures in hours. Experimental validation takes weeks to months, using assays and tools from an era that did not build to scale. The Assay-A-Thon is a first-of-kind prototyping hackathon that brings wet-lab, engineering and computational scientists together to answer one question: what validation toolkit does AI-enabled discovery need?
The challenges
We encourage teams to work across these layers of experimental validation. Projects can focus on the development of hardware, assays, or other relevant tools.
🧬 Protein Design. Build the assays, workflows and benchmarks that tell us quickly and cheaply which designed binders, enzymes and immune modulators are valid. Themes include triage at scale, linking binding to function, and benchmarking model confidence against experimental data.
🔧 Prototyping Assays. Design and build the hardware that automated labs are missing: microfluidics, environmental control, spatial patterning, automation-ready devices and continuous readouts. Prototype on site with 3D printers and laser cutters, or deliver a fully specified design.
📊 Functional Omics Assays. Design experimental tools or assays that couple meaningful phenotypic readouts (antigen specificity, intervention response, signalling, cellular trajectory) to sequenceable signals, so hundreds to thousands of AI-generated hypotheses can be tested in parallel and benchmarked reproducibly.
The prize
The overall winner receives the Litmus Science Validation Prize: a funded, head-to-head experiment against the existing validation gold standard experiment in a real lab. The winning team will leave with something rare - a prototype AND proof of concept data. Teams own what they build.
Who should apply
We are looking for intersectional teams! We welcome graduate researchers, postdocs, industry scientists, engineers and founders from academia, biotech or industry. We are especially looking for:
Wet-lab scientists in assay development, protein biochemistry, immunology, single-cell and NGS workflows
Engineers in hardware, 3D printing, microfluidics, instrumentation and lab automation
Computational scientists in protein design, ML, bioinformatics and pipeline engineering
Apply solo or as a pre-formed team. Solo applicants can self-match into existing teams or with other solo candidates at the orientation event once accepted.
Key details
📅 Friday 6-8 November
📍 London, hosted by Pillar VC
🍽️ All meals provided
✅ You must be able to attend all three days in person.
Learn more
How to apply
Places are limited - register and answer the questionnaire. We will form 9 teams (30–45 participants).
Applications close Monday 2 November and are reviewed on a rolling basis, so apply early.
The Assay-A-Thon is organized by ImmunOS, Hosted by Pillar VC, and Powered by ARIA. Our partners include Litmus Science, Lightcast, Full Circle Labs and Flowmatters.
ImmunOS is an ARIA innovator circle where blue-sky science ideas are discussed in person. Our group explores how we can treat the immune system like an operating system, how immune intelligence emerges, and how we might model and engineer it. We are a multi-faceted group spanning academia and industry, with wide-ranging expertise in immunology, ML, bioengineering and beyond.
Questions, accessibility needs or partnership enquiries: research@immunos.bio