BioHackathon Europe 2025 Report

This report documents BioHackathon Europe 2025, ELIXIR's annual flagship collaborative hacking event, held 3 to 7 November 2025 at the Hotel Esplanade Resort & Spa, Bad Saarow, Germany. Organised by the ELIXIR Hub, the event brought together an international community of life scientists, developers, data stewards and infrastructure experts to accelerate the development of open, interoperable solutions for the life sciences.

The 2025 event featured 31 hacking projects across five days of intensive collaboration. Projects spanned a broad range of ELIXIR strategic priority areas including research data management and FAIR implementation, AI and machine learning readiness, biodiversity genomics, secure and federated data access, cloud and workflow infrastructures, and sustainable computing.

The event programme included opening flash presentations, daily uninterrupted hacking sessions, a new interactive mid-week poster session (replacing the traditional reporting format), and final presentations. Shared social activities fostered community building and cross-project collaboration. A post-event participant survey indicated strong satisfaction with the format, with dedicated hacking time rated as the most valuable component. The majority of respondents reported improved technical skills as a result of participation.

Related resources

• Event photos: Flickr album 
• Project outputs: GitHub repository
• Preprints: BioHackrXiv