Obesity, one of the most urgent health challenges of our time, affects more than 890 million people worldwide and drives the risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. Despite the success of new drugs like Ozempic, many patients do not respond or face side effects — highlighting the need for deeper biological insight. At the center of this problem are adipocytes, the fat cells that regulate how our bodies store and burn energy.

Recent advances in single-cell genomics and CRISPR-based perturbation screens have revealed that adipocytes exist in diverse states, yet the molecular factors that determine whether they store or expend energy remain poorly understood. The Obesity Machine Learning Competition: Tackling Metabolic Diseases challenges participants to predict how gene perturbations influence the fate of fat cells — shifting them between energy-storing and energy-burning states.

Top-performing models will be experimentally tested in the lab, allowing your algorithms to directly guide biological discovery and help uncover new molecular pathways for treating obesity and metabolic disease. ‍

Registration opens soon through Crunch and the challenge will start on December 8, 2025.