As a society, our ability to respond to the pandemic is only as strong as our testing capabilities, and we know that testing efforts thus far have been hampered by supply shortages and limited lab processing capacity.
Well, now two non-profits have teamed up to advance the state of COVID-19 testing. XPrize is a foundation that uses cash awards to incentivize development by the general public in order to solve problems that benefit humanity. The organization recently announced a partnership with OpenCovidScreen, an outfit that’s focused on testing, for a "Rapid COVID Testing” competition, and the purse is impressive – $5 million to be doled out across different category winners.
There are contents dedicated towards at-home test technology, as well as those for use in point-of-care or lab settings. According to Engadget, Xprize and OpenCovidScreen wish to see a huge variety of solution submissions and are encouraging any viable technologies to be considered. The entries will be gauged on not only their innovation but also factors like their ability to scale and their overall cost.
The idea is to award five teams a million bucks each on a flexible timeline – but not too flexible. XPrize wants to start dumping money into viable projects so they can quickly work up to pilot programs that might be real-world ready by early next year.
The partnership has also announced a companion incentive program it’s calling the COVID Apollo Project, which is a $50 million dollar investment fund to help some of the more promising technologies make the leap from development and testing to actually reaching the market quickly. OpenCovidScreen’s co-founder Jeff Huber believes improvements in testing could mean the ability to catch an outbreak at a school or business before it spreads.
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