The UAB Systems Pharmacology AI Research Center (SPARC) invites multidisciplinary teams to move a promising idea from mechanism toward an experimentally testable therapy. Three teams each receive up to $40,000 in combined SPARC and Southern Research services — AI design and wet-lab support, plus $1,000 in prize money.
The competition now offers $40,000 in combined in-kind support from SPARC and Southern Research for AI design and wet-lab services, along with an additional $1,000 in prize money, per winning team.
CollaboFest is designed to move promising research — a mechanism, a clinical observation, an accessible dataset — toward an experimentally testable therapeutic solution, generating pilot evidence for grants, publications, partnerships, and potential UAB intellectual property. Teams submit a concise three-page proposal through the CollaboFest portal.
Assemble a multidisciplinary team that owns the science and a credible path to validation. Name the single decision, prediction, or asset you need SPARC to produce.
Describe the unmet need, central hypothesis, scientific foundation, the SPARC support requested, your team readiness, and a feasible validation plan — through the designated portal.
Agent-assisted analysis supports a judging panel that recommends winners. Three teams jointly define a focused scope of SPARC services with SPARC.
A short look at how a biomedical insight moves from idea to a testable therapeutic strategy — powered by SPARC's AI design and Southern Research's wet-lab capabilities.
Projects may address Targets, Chemicals, or Patient Cohorts, or an integrated end-to-end path that connects mechanism, therapeutic design, validation, and the patients most likely to benefit.
Identify and prioritize a disease mechanism, candidate target, pathway, cell type, biomarker, or modality-selection question using AI and systems pharmacology.
Move from a small molecule, antibody, biologic, or repositioning opportunity toward a prioritized, testable set of candidates through virtual screening and generative design.
Define the right population — responder signatures, digital twins, synthetic cohorts, and virtual trials — to explain variable response and de-risk translation.
The strongest submissions often connect the pillars — turning a published mechanism into a candidate shortlist and an assay-ready validation package for a molecularly defined patient group.
See the full service menu →Each selected project receives a jointly defined scope valued at up to $40,000 in combined SPARC (AI design) and Southern Research (wet-lab) services. A practical project usually emphasizes one primary service module and a few supporting analyses. During scoping, SPARC and the team agree on the question, inputs, deliverables, validation handoff, and stopping point.
Unless explicitly scoped, awards do not cover compound synthesis or purchase, animal studies, clinical recruitment, IRB or regulatory submissions, patent fees, or third-party costs. Scoped wet-lab validation is available through Southern Research; SPARC can help design and connect other downstream activities.
Every team needs a scientific home in the network — but the rest of your team can come from anywhere.
Each team must include a co-investigator whose primary institutional affiliation is either the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) or an institution in the UAB-led Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) Partner Network. Additional members may come from other institutions or organizations, subject to program requirements.
View CCTS Partner Network →The most useful proposals name the decision to be made, the evidence already available, the SPARC work needed, the intended deliverable, and the experiment or translational step that follows.
The disease problem or critical translational barrier.
The target, mechanism, intervention, or patient-selection concept to test.
Key publications, preliminary findings, clinical observations, and data.
The decision, prediction, design, or translational asset you want to produce.
The specific services needed — and why they are essential.
Expertise, datasets, assays, models, clinical resources, partners, and funding.
A feasible experimental, computational, clinical, or translational test of the output — and how success supports a grant, manuscript, invention disclosure, licensing opportunity, startup, partnership, or clinical study. Candidate-generating projects should identify a wet-lab validation route.
SPARC uses automated, agent-assisted reviews as decision support to keep preliminary assessment consistent — they do not independently select winners. A panel of judges reviews the evidence and recommends the final awards.
Of the unmet need and translational potential.
Strength of rationale and differentiation from existing approaches.
Alignment with AI and systems-pharmacology capabilities.
Within the available service award and project period.
Quality and accessibility of the required data.
And clear ownership of the follow-up work.
Judges represent SPARC, the UAB Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS), the Marnix E. Heersink Institute for Biomedical Innovation, Southern Research, and the UAB-led CCTS. An additional $1,000 in prize money per winning team, provided through the Marnix E. Heersink Institute for Biomedical Innovation, will also be awarded.
Held July 31 — covering eligibility, proposal requirements, available SPARC support, and the review process. Couldn't attend? Catch up below.
Watch the recording →Download the slides ↓Use the Team Readiness Self-Checklist to recruit collaborators and secure data access and a validation owner before you submit.
Three-page proposals are due. Complete and submit through your CollaboFest workspace; submission is required for all contestants.
Start application →Automated analysis supports a judging panel drawn from SPARC and its co-sponsors.
Three teams are selected. Each jointly scopes up to $40,000 in combined SPARC and Southern Research services, plus $1,000 in prize money.
Selected teams and SPARC finish the scoped computational deliverables — the AI and systems-pharmacology outputs defined during scoping.
Teams collect the experimental, clinical, or translational validation of their AI-generated results through their identified validation route.
All participating groups are invited to present at the AI Drug Discovery session of the Annual Translational and Transformative Informatics Symposium (ATTIS).
The Team Readiness Self-Checklist is a planning aid, not a rigid eligibility screen. Strong teams usually have a clear scientific premise, accessible inputs, complementary expertise beyond informatics, and an owned path to validation.
The essential foundation is set, required data are accessible, and a validation owner, model, or partner is identified. Go.
The science is strong, but one collaborator, data-access step, or validation resource still needs to be secured. Name the gap and closure plan in the proposal.
The requested SPARC decision is unclear, data can't yet be accessed, or no one owns validation. Recruit or scope before submitting.
Everything an applicant needs, as PDFs you can download, mark up, and share with your team. The Request for Applications plus its two companion guides.
The complete brief: the challenge, eligibility, project types, the seven-part proposal, review criteria and process, award scope, and submission instructions.
Download & print ↓An idea-generating menu of SPARC capabilities across Targets, Chemicals, and Patient Cohorts. Covers the $20,000 SPARC AI-design portion of the combined $40,000 award; Southern Research adds scoped wet-lab services.
Download & print ↓A planning aid to identify strengths, close gaps, and build a team ready to carry an AI-generated result into validation and translation.
Download & print ↓
In your CollaboFest workspace, create your project, add team members, link your Box folder, complete the readiness checklist, and submit your three-page proposal.
