24hr AI Science Cell Culture Hack @ Monomer Bio
While the hack is full, there are a few spots left to join for the demos Sunday. More here.
We're bringing together the best of the Bay Area's AI, science, and hardware communities to explore how to tackle cell culture in lab automation.
We'll have the latest AI tools for protocol design for teams to build with and development as well as chance to ship something on Monomer's robotic workcell.
**No pre-reqs. All scientists, product designers, software, and hardware engineers welcome**
Everyone joining will be expected to demo something by end of the weekend.
We'll have some hardware, robots, and labware available on the Monomer workcell:
Robotic liquid handlers - Opentrons' Flex and OT-2s
Robotic microscope - by Cephla
Robotic incubators - by Liconic
Robotic arm - by KX-2
We welcome all skill levels and can support 50 builders.
🔑 You must be able to stay through demo on sunday to participate.
Monomer's Challenge
Grow the highest yield from a mystery cell culture revealed only on the morning of the event.
How quickly can you onboard a cell culture you’re not familiar with by leveraging an AI Scientist to look up protocol parameters and implement best practices like pre-warming media all the while leveraging Monomer’s automation to execute and test a protocol?
We’re opening up our robotic workcell through an MCP interface, letting you tap into automated cell culture routines like:
🧪 Incubate
💧 Media change
🔄 Passage
🔬 Take an image
…and more.
Rethink cell development. Onboarding a new cell line is notoriously difficult and lab automation is traditionally too intimidating to program and inflexible. We want to change that.
AI Science partners
Potato’s AI scientist goes beyond literature review to design, execute, and analyze experiments, enabling faster, parallelized research and powering a future where science runs continuously.
Cypher AI is your AI scientific software engineer! Cypher supercharges productivity by letting you create and run custom software tools without requiring coding skills. Applications include designing protocols, wrangling data, building shareable widgets, and setting up scientific instrument workflows.
Briefly Bio is a London-based science startup building AI-powered software to make lab experiments more reproducible by helping scientists accurately capture and share protocols.
Saturday agenda
9:30a Check in + breakfast
10:00a Kickoff
11:00a Finalize teams
12:00p Hack + build #1
6:00p Dinner + Round table talks
7:00p Hack + build #2
12:00a Robots go to sleep.
Sunday agenda
3p Final submission
330p-4p Walk around showcase
4-5p Demos + Pitching
🤖 **Register for the final demos**
Thank you to our sponsors for helping make it happen!
Monomer Bio, founded in 2021 and based in San Francisco, specializes in wet-lab productivity and automation software built for cell biology workflows.
Hardware partners
Opentrons Robotics, a business unit of Opentrons Labworks, Inc., is the industry leader in flexible, user-friendly automation for life science labs. Our open-source ecosystem offers the scientific community the tools they need to automate experiments, share protocols and reproduce each other's results.
Community partners
Lila Sciences is a technology company building scientific superintelligence to apply AI to every aspect of the scientific method.
Bay area lab automators is a community of scientists, engineers, and tinkerers working at the intersection of hardware, software, and lab innovation.
SF Hardware Meetup, community of 9,500+ hardware professionals meeting monthly to building meaningful connections
Worldwide Studios hosts ai + hardware hacks and 1-1 sprints to help people build with the latest tools.
if you want to help sponsor this event or volunteer send us a note at michael (at) hardwaremeetup (dot) com