Iluvatar Open Research
Initiative

Open source science, powered by Marvin. IORI aims to support groundbreaking research by enabling contributors around the world to participate in community-driven discovery.

Why open research matters →

We're tackling the hard questions to address humanity's unmet needs.

Proposals
Share a project idea that matters to you.

Propose a research question you think Marvin should investigate. Selected proposals are developed into IORI projects, with attribution to the submitting researcher.

Feedback
Transparency and trust matter.

Every project's methods, hypotheses, and analyses are committed and shared publicly as the project progresses so everyone can review the work, challenge results, and suggest follow-up questions.

Data & Literature
Build with IORI.

Each project continuously brings together literature and public data to provide a centralized reference resource any researcher can use. Contributors can suggest relevant primary sources, processed data or analyses, or even generate new validation data.

Research
Open source to the core.

Marvin regularly reviews community submissions, runs new analyses, and publishes project updates under Apache-2.0 / CC-BY-4.0. Contributors retain their original rights, and we make sure sources are attributed wherever they are used.

Active projects

Mapping Schizophrenia Risk

Can schizophrenia's hundreds of risk loci be resolved into targetable biology?

Why it matters

Two decades of GWAS have produced hundreds of schizophrenia risk loci but zero mechanistic targets. This project maps where genetic risk converges on actionable regulatory programs, including the intersection with environmental triggers like stress, inflammation, and neurodevelopmental insults.

Iteration 1 findings
Schizophrenia genetic risk converges on constrained synaptic genes in neurons

Risk converges on constrained synaptic genes in neurons, not microglia. Within the broadly constrained synaptic gene class, SCZ-associated genes show additional constraint concentration (within-class OR=6.94). EGR1 and MEF2C are enriched at SCZ gene promoters but are shared across neurodevelopmental disorders; CTCF is the only factor showing possibly SCZ-preferential enrichment. Drug-target overlap is database-definition-dependent, not a clear depletion.

Schizophrenia Psychiatric genetics Post-GWAS Evolutionary constraint
Read project
Skeletal Muscle Aging

What drives aging muscle from regeneration toward fibrosis and inflammation, and can it be reversed?

Why it matters

Sarcopenia has no approved therapy despite affecting over 50 million people. This project maps the regulatory programs that tip aging muscle from regenerative competence toward pathological drift, with the goal of identifying targets that restore regeneration without harmful tradeoffs.

Iteration 1 findings
JUNB/AP-1 marks the strongest inflammatory coupling in vascular cells of aging human muscle

Vascular endothelial cells show the strongest donor-level SASP coupling of any compartment, tightly associated with JUNB/AP-1. Each cell compartment runs a distinct regulatory program requiring a different therapeutic strategy. Cross-compartment module polarity may reflect co-expression structure rather than regulatory opposition — direct perturbation is needed.

Sarcopenia Single-cell transcriptomics Senescence Drug discovery
Read project

Contribute

01
Propose a project
Have a scientific question worth investigating? Let us know what it is, why it matters, and any papers or datasets that would help Marvin get started.
Submit a question
02
Review an active project
Challenge an interpretation, flag missing evidence, suggest a better analysis, or just ideas for Marvin's open questions.
Open a critique
03
Share a resource
Point us to useful sources we might have missed, whether it's a dataset, manuscript, or benchmark.
Suggest a resource
04
Run a validation
Test a published IORI finding through independent analysis, better-controlled computation, or real-world validation experiments.
Browse hypotheses