The upcoming M² Hack [Merck x Mest = M² Hackathon] in Cape Town is open.

Merck and MEST join forces to power up this year’s most exciting hackathon, with interesting challenges ranging from access to healthcare to biosensing and interfaces, and who better to join than South Africa’s most innovative and brilliant tech and creative minds.

The goal of M² Hack is to let creative talents invent, innovate, and connect with our products and services to show their adaptability, creativity, and resourcefulness by solving unique challenges around biotech, healthcare and sensor technologies. The hackathon creates a platform for the youth of South Africa to use their skills in coding, media, design, marketing, engineering, business skills, and data analytics to collaborate and showcase their skills.

The hackathon calls all students and startups who are interested in creating innovative solutions between biotechnology and the digital world and help to build on viable and unique solutions from scratch.

The two-day event will be held in partnership with Merck and MEST and hosted at MEST Incubator Cape Town in Woodstock on 8 and 9 September. Participants have the opportunity to engage with top tech mentors, field experts and to win cool prizes.

To give South Africa’s techies and creatives a taste of what is to come, here are a few areas the hackathon will focus on:

* Healthcare Access Solutions – Enhance delivery of healthcare through financing therapies, connected logistics, community self-service enablement and affordable, faster diagnosis.

* Engagement beyond the pill – Develop solutions that enable pharmaceutical companies and Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) for better engagement.

* Biosensing and Interfaces – Generating novel insights and building new business models around the integration of electronics and biology to enable us to develop groundbreaking medical treatment solutions, based on a unique mix of sensor data retrieval, machine learning, and curation expertise.