Anthropic and Cerebral Valley are running a virtual hackathon called Built with Claude: Life Sciences, in partnership with Gladstone Institutes, a biomedical research organization in San Francisco. It runs for one full week, July 7 to 13 (EDT), entirely remote, so you can join from anywhere.
The star of the show is Claude Science, Anthropic's research workbench that pulls literature, data, code, and compute into a single environment, alongside the Claude Code you already know. It's aimed squarely at researchers, clinicians, bioinformaticians, and biotech builders.
Two tracks
Research track (from the bench): start from a biological question you've been chewing on, and use Claude Science to deliver something concrete, a finding, a trained model, or an analysis others can reproduce.
Build track (beyond the bench): start from a user in the life sciences you can name, a scientist, a clinic, a biotech, and use Claude Code to build the tool they're missing, working software that outlasts the week.
Real datasets to dig into
For the Research track, several labs at Gladstone are opening up unique datasets:
- The T cell Perturb-seq dataset from Alex Marson's lab (with Stanford's Jonathan Pritchard), to hunt for new drug targets.
- Katie Pollard's approach: train a model that reads DNA to predict regulatory activity, then ask what a single-base change does (massively parallel reporter assays).
- Nevan Krogan's protein interaction networks, to uncover new biology, pin down which complex or pathway is doing the work, or predict a missing component.
What you get
Across both tracks, 500 participants are selected. Each one gets a month of Claude Max 20x plus $200 in API credits, and one week to build. The prize on the line is $100k in Claude API and usage credits. Judges include representatives from Anthropic and Gladstone Institutes.
real tools, one week.
How to join
It's fully online, capped at 500 participants, with a maximum team size of 2, and everyone has to submit an application for approval. It kicks off July 7 (EDT), so if you want in, apply now.
Why I'm sharing this
I build with Claude myself, so this kind of event hits home. It doesn't ask you to daydream an AI idea, it hands you real data, real tools, and one week, and makes you ship something reproducible and usable. Even if you're not in biotech, just look at how the two tracks are framed, start from the bench, or start from a user you can name. That's a great way to build anything. If you touch life sciences at all, this one's worth a shot.
Source: cerebralvalley.ai · Built with Claude: Life Sciences
Wayne / 2026.07.03 · iam.waynemvrs.com