Agents for Precision Health: a ClawBio Hackathon in Doha
The first agentic AI for health hackathon in the Middle East.
Two days at Sidra Medicine. Real precision health questions. You build AI agents that do actual scientific work, and show a jury what they found.
When: Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 December 2026, 09:00 to 17:00
Where: Sidra Medicine, Education City, Doha
Cost: free, with lunch and coffee
Then: the 12th PMFG Summit, 7 to 9 December, Qatar National Convention Centre
Why come
AI agents can now plan an analysis, run the tools, check the result and write it up.
In genomics and medicine that only counts if someone else can inspect what the agent did, rerun it and get the same answer.
In two days you will:
learn to work with a coding agent, from people who build these systems
solve a real question in a team of up to five
present your result to a jury from science, industry and venture capital
meet the investigators in Qatar who are hiring
We use ClawBio, an open-source project in which agents work through written, versioned skills, so every step is on the record.
Speakers
Dr Khalid Fakhro, Chief Research Officer, Sidra Medicine. Opens the event.
Dr Manuel Corpas, Principal Investigator, Sidra Medicine, and founder of ClawBio. Agentic genomics, and whether we can trust it.
Cameron Lloyd, co-maintainer of ClawBio. A live worked example with a coding agent.
More speakers will be added as they confirm.
Programme
Saturday 5 December
09:00 Opening, Dr Khalid Fakhro
09:15 Agentic genomics: can we trust it? Dr Manuel Corpas
09:40 Invited talks
10:45 Live worked example: one small analysis, from input data to a checked result, with a coding agent. Cameron Lloyd
12:00 The three tracks, their starter questions, and teams
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Build, with mentors on the floor
16:00 Careers panel: working in computational genomics and AI in Qatar, with investigators who are hiring
16:45 Social
Sunday 6 December
09:00 Build, with mentors on hand
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Submissions close
14:00 Demos, five minutes per team
15:30 Jury deliberation
16:00 Awards and close
Three tracks
You do not need to arrive with an idea. Pick a track and start on a prepared question in the first hour.
Track 1. Rare and paediatric disease
Rank candidate variants from a child's phenotype, show the evidence, and say when the agent cannot decide
Turn messy phenotype sheets into a clean, coded pedigree, with every change logged
Write a variant evidence summary in which every claim points to its source
Track 2. Women's and newborn health
Run a microbiome analysis from raw data to result, with the full record of what was run
Triage a newborn screening gene panel, and state what cannot be concluded
Gather and grade the published evidence for a drug and gene pair in pregnancy
Track 3. Omics in under-represented populations
Measure how a polygenic score transfers across ancestries, and report where it fails
Match pharmacogene results to dosing guidance, and find where an agent is confident without support
Produce an association report another team can rerun and get the same numbers
Every question comes with
a short brief
example data (public or synthetic; no patient data)
a ClawBio skill to start from
a clear definition of done
A mentor agrees the scope with each team before it starts, so you finish what you begin. You can also bring your own question.
An agent that confidently invents an answer is worse than one that says it does not know. You are building for the second behaviour.
The jury
On Sunday afternoon every team presents to a jury from science, industry and venture capital. They ask two things:
Can the agent's work be inspected and trusted?
Could it become something real?
Ajiri Omafokpe, co-founder of Builders Tribe, is the first confirmed member. More will be announced.
Who should come
Bioinformaticians and computational biologists
Genomics researchers and clinicians
Students and postdocs
Software engineers and machine learning people
From Qatar, the region and further afield.
You do not need to have used ClawBio or an AI coding agent before. You do need to be comfortable reading and running code.
Before the day
Once you are registered we invite you to the ClawBio Slack. There you:
pick a track
find teammates, up to five per team
get your laptop set up before Saturday
ask for help during the build, and carry on afterwards
Practical details
Bring: a laptop
Food: lunch and coffee are provided
Compute: GPU credits for teams that need them, supported by NVIDIA
Places: limited. Registration is reviewed; you will hear from us within 48 hours
Code: ClawBio is open source at ClawBio/ClawBio
PMFG Summit: 7 to 9 December, Qatar National Convention Centre, sidraweb.sidra.org/events/research/pmfg/2026