XPRIZE - Rapid Covid Testing

XPRIZE – Rapid Covid Testing

September 23, 2020
2 min read

The rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated but due to participating in the XPRIZE competition for rapid covid testing we are lacking resources to update the pathogen alerts.

We’re very excited to have made the semi-finals and are now running against 219 other teams to come up with a solution for rapid, cheap and easy COVID-19 tests. Our current prototype can run 81 simple saliva tests in under 15 minutes. It is still being tweaked with the expectation to be able to soon run test below 12 minutes. This means that one device can perform close to 8000 test per day. And the tests are cheap, costing less than 1 USD per test.

Being pitted against 219 teams with a barely 6 weeks old prototype, we are not expecting to win. Even if we would win, we would still need your help for making these tests widely available. So please consider supporting us and help us making tests available in remote area’s where healthcare is challenging. It is important that we protect people who live in vulnerable areas. Vaccines are a nice prospect but they will not be universally available for more than a year. Even with vaccines available, local outbreaks will still happen. Effectively stopping this pandemic can only be achieved with massive testing and isolation.

Photo: RT-PCR entry for the XPRIZE rapid covid testing competition

For us this competition is an important incentive as it would give us the means to do more. Not just for COVID-19 but for combating other diseases as well. We have entered the competition along with commercial partner Mmolecular who will be producing the device and supplying reagents. This partnership enables us to make everything available on a non-commercial basis to low resource countries and other NGO’s who provide medical care to people in need.

We will be providing more updates on how this is progressing soon.

XPRIZE, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is the global leader in designing and implementing innovative competition models to solve the world’s grandest challenges. Active competitions include the $20 Million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, the $10 Million Rainforest XPRIZE, the $10 Million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, the $5 Million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling, XPRIZE NextGen Mask Challenge and $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing. For more information, visit xprize.org.

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