Group puts up $5 million in prizes to expedite development of fast, easy coronavirus test
Hoping to expand testing capabilities for COVID-19, scientists, business leaders and humanitarians said Tuesday that they are funding a $5 million competition to encourage an easy, low-cost diagnostic tool that will turn around results in minutes or, at the most, hours.
The nonprofit XPrize designed and will run this incentive competition, as it has done with other contests to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. In this case, XPrize is working with another nonprofit called OpenCovidScreen founded by scientists and business leaders who want to get schools and workplaces back to everyday life.
“Competition is the key to innovation,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, “and XPrize is seizing this moment to challenge the best and brightest minds around the world to develop COVID-19 testing that is high-quality, affordable and accessible. I look forward to seeing the breakthroughs that arise from this challenge and the countless lives that will be saved as a result.”
XPrize is calling on teams to submit diagnostics that will work in four settings: home, medical offices, distributed labs or high through-put labs. Entries will be judged based upon their innovation, their performance, the turnaround times, how easily they are scale up to meet demand, ease of use and cost.
“Any strategy to contain the virus is completely reliant on frequent, fast and reliable testing, but testing supply chains are currently stretched to the limit. when coupled with accelerating demand, test result turnaround times will slow even further unless new solutions are brought to the table,” said Amir Banifatemi, XPrize’s chief innovation and growth officer.
Blue Shield of California and six other health insurers are helping to fund XPrize Rapid COVID Testing, along with Anthem Foundation, Anthem Inc., Google, Amazon and others.
“At Anthem, we are committed to improving the lives of those we serve as well as the health of our communities at large,” said Rajeev Ronanki, chief digital officer for the insurer. “To help deliver on this commitment, we are focused on advancing innovation inside and outside our organization to make health care simpler and more affordable. We are excited to work alongside so many other Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans as well as the other XPrize partners.”
Last week, hospital leaders told The Bee that testing capabilities are being stretched as Texas and Florida also experience surges in cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus.
XPrize is starting to accept applicants for its competition today through Aug. 31 at xprize.org/covidtesting, and it has set up a rigorous competition schedule. All entries require a $100 registration fee, and only 200 teams will get passes to the semifinals.
Those 200 teams, which will be named by Sept. 15, will be sent a number of samples, one of which will contain COVID-19. They will have one week to return results, and those results will be graded on specificity, sensitivity and limits of detection.
The judges will select finalists by Sept. 29, and the diagnostic tests from those teams will be sent to labs for clinical validation. Each of the top 5 performing teams will receive $500,000.
They will then be assigned a location in the United States to do pilot testing for 60 days, where they will have to perform at least 500 tests a week. Judges will review the results of each team’s product. Each team that meets the criteria will receive another $500,000. Those winning teams will be announced Jan. 20.
The teams with the best ideas will then have a chance to work with experienced life sciences investors and company builders as part of the $50 million COVID Apollo Project to get their ideas to market and to scale them to meet the demand of millions of people. Boston’s RA Capital, a biotechnology-focused investment firm, organized the COVID Apollo effort along with Redmile Group, Samsara Biocapital, Perceptive Advisors and Bain Capital.
Jeff Huber, co-founder of OpenCovidScreen and a former Google executive, said: “We need solutions that are frequent, fast turnaround, cheap and easy...and that are supply chain diverse. There is near infinite need and demand at the right price. We need screening testing capabilities 100-times greater than our current status to return our economy and society to normal function.”
This story was originally published July 28, 2020 at 3:52 PM.
