Competition gives global community opportunity to develop frequent, fast-turnaround, inexpensive, and easy-to-use screening tests to identify COVID-19 cases before seeding outbreaks
Update as of January 28, 2021: Clinical validation of the finalist teams’ assays (investigative procedure in laboratory medicine) is currently underway at partner labs. This testing is set to conclude on February 10th. We will keep you updated as this competition concludes and solutions are announced.
Cambia Health Solutions, in collaboration with XPRIZE, OpenCovidScreen, Anthem, Inc. and other innovative organizations, today announced the $5 million XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing Competition to accelerate the development of affordable, accurate and efficient COVID-19 testing.
“Navigating this new era of COVID-19 requires us all to work together with a shared commitment to the health and well-being of people and families,” said Cambia Health Solutions CEO Mark Ganz. “Cambia joins this coalition to drive the innovation we need to bring affordable, rapid and accurate testing of this virus. We are stronger when we work together.”
Over a six-month period, the XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing competition will encourage the world’s most innovative individuals and organizations to develop new testing methods that embody four principles:
• Frequent: allowing for necessary testing at least weekly
• Fast turn-around: maximum 12 hours from sample to result
• Cost effective: an affordable price point for consumers
• Easy: the ability for self-collection
Currently, most available COVID-19 tests take several days to obtain results, are expensive, invasive, and limited due to supply chain issues. XPRIZE Rapid Covid Testing aims to meet the need to scale testing capabilities by 100-times the current standard, the level of increase needed to more safely return to everyday activities. Having more affordable testing and obtaining results faster may help lead to more people being tested as well as better, data-driven contact tracing and isolating strategies.
Teams can compete in one of the following four categories: at home, point-of-care, distributed lab, or central lab. To ensure supply chain diverse solutions, entries are encouraged in a variety of underlying testing approaches (PCR, Isothermal/LAMP/RPA, CRISPR, Antigen-detection, Next Generation Sequencing, and other technologies). Entries will be judged on overall innovation of solution, appropriate performance, turnaround time, scaling properties and frequency enabled, ease-of-use and cost of solution.
Cambia Executive Medical Director Dr. Amy Khan will join XPRIZE as an Advisory Board member, supporting XPRIZE using her clinical expertise and health care background.
Potential competitors, whether a team or an individual looking for a team, should visit xprize.org/covidtesting to register, access all the resources available and read the competition guidelines. Registration is $100 and ends August 31, 2020.
Cambia Health Solutions is a founding partner of the coalition. Other founding partners include Blue Shield of California, Health Care Service Corporation, Florida Blue, Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Jersey, Google Health, Ilumina, Amazon, Exact Sciences, Twist Bioscience, and Opentrons. Founding anchor partners of XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing are Anthem Foundation and Anthem, Inc.
