LOS ANGELES (March 16, 2021) – XPRIZE announced today the five winning teams in the $6M XPRIZE Rapid Covid Testing competition to create high-quality, affordable COVID-19 testing to help society safely reopen and return to everyday activities.
Chosen by an independent panel of judges, the grand prize winning solutions are radically affordable compared to what is currently available on the market; and are comparable to commercial offerings at measuring sensitivity, specificity and limit of detection, with a maximum turnaround time of 12 hours from sample to result. The winning teams are:
- Reliable LFC, LLC, Antigen Testing, Carlsbad, United States
- ChromaCode, RNA Testing, Carlsbad, United States
- Mirimus, RNA Testing, Brooklyn, United States
- La Jolla Institute for Immunology, RNA Testing, La Jolla, United States
- Alveo Technologies, RNA Testing, Alameda, United States
Following the December finalist announcements, the 20 teams sent their testing kits and protocols to two separate laboratories, for clinical validation. The independent judges, composed of diverse experts in the healthcare and COVID-19 space, reviewed each team’s lab results, testing concepts, and proposals before deciding on the winners.
“While vaccines are important, we cannot rely on them alone to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and future outbreaks, especially not until they are provided around the world, and mass at-scale,” said Jeff Huber, President & Co-Founder of OpenCovidScreen. “These technological breakthroughs in rapid Covid testing are providing a safety net to ensure the spread of the disease is contained and to enable a safe return to work and school, and to protect hotspots like nursing homes. These advancements are key to helping underserved, under-resourced communities get access to affordable, accurate tests and to ultimately save more lives now and in the future.”
Additionally, four other teams were selected as winners in the Open Innovation Track, whose approaches demonstrated high potential for impactful screening solutions, but could not be categorized as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), Isothermal Amplification, Next Generation Sequencing, or Antigen Detection could not be tested through the competition rounds.
The four winning teams in the Open Innovation Track are:
- Steradian Technologies, Inc., Houston, United States
- U-smell-it, Guilford, United States
- Ram Global, Zweibrücken, Germany
- TeraGroup, Herzliya, Israel
The XPRIZE Rapid Covid Testing judges included:
- Rick Bright, Ph.D, Immunology and Molecular Pathogenesis
- Shawna Butler, R.N. M.D.A., Nurse Economist
- Charity Dean, CEO and Co-Founder, The Public Health Company
- Paul Drain, Associate Professor, Departments of Global Health, Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Washington
- Anita Goel, Physicist and Physician, Chairman and CEO, Nanobiosym
- Michael Mina, Physician-Scientist and Assistant Professor, Epidemiology and Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health
- Anne Wyllie, Associate Research Scientist, Yale School of Public Health
“The competition was open to all modalities of molecular testing, and the teams submitted an impressive range of ideas. The winners created innovative technologies in rapid PCR, novel antigens, and point-of-care LAMP as well as pioneering some of the first-ever olfaction and breathalyzer tests,” said Chris Mason, Leader of the Science Team and a Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Launched this past July amid the COVID-19 pandemic, this prize comes out of the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance to bring researchers, innovators, institutions, corporations, and governments together to share ideas and resources in the fight against current and future pandemics. Since launch, 85 organizations have joined the Alliance, where they have been able to share ideas and research through its Digital Collaboration Platform Exchange, as well as through the XPRIZE Data Collaborative, a unique platform for innovators to collaborate, share and learn from data in a broad spectrum of fields in their search for solutions.