XPrize to give $5 million to creator of cheap, fast COVID

Tech giants including Google and Amazon pledged support for a $5 million competition to accelerate cheap and fast COVID-19 testing in the U.S.

The competition is being run by XPrize, the non-profit organization that designs public competitions to solve global challenges with hefty grants. Recently, it offered $10 million to the first team able to create a functional robotic avatar by 2021.

This time, it's offering up $5 million to innovators around the globe who can come up with inexpensive, fast, and easy COVID-19 testing that enables effective, data-driven tracing.

Teams are tasked with creating a test with a maximum turnaround time of 12 hours, from sample to result, using a minimally invasive collection procedure. And each test must cost less than $15, including all materials. While the prices of current COVID-19 tests vary, most cost around $100.

Since the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, testing has become crucial to quelling the spread of the virus. Bureaucratic delays led to a shaky start to the development of tests in the U.S. — the Washington Postput together a strong timeline of just how badly this went, and you can watch John Oliver's deep dive into this if you want to get mad.

According to the CDC, more than 52.9 million tests have been conducted in the U.S. More than 5 million came up positive (about 10 percent). Now distributed at the behest of state and local health departments, the test itself is not as scary as it looks, just a cotton swab through your nose to the back of your throat. Johns Hopkins University reports that the U.S. has conducted more total COVID-19 tests than any other country — but countries that tested heavily early and got the pandemic under control have less need to test now.

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SEE ALSO: Trump administration strips some COVID-19 data from CDC website

XPrize says that most currently available COVID-19 tests are "expensive, slow, invasive, and are supply-chain limited," and that the competition aims to boost current testing capabilities by 100 times, in a move, the organization says, necessary to reopening local economies and systems.

"Fast, affordable, and accessible testing is crucial to containing the Covid-19 pandemic and safely reopening schools, businesses and other vital institutions around the world," said Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPrize, in a press statement. "XPrize Rapid Covid Testing is inspiring the best entrepreneurial and scientific teams to come together to work towards rapid, affordable Covid-19 testing at scale, and ultimately, getting the world up and running again."

XPrize is working with scientist-founded nonprofit OpenCovidScreen on the prize, with major national and regional health plans including Blue Shield of California and Health Care Service acting as founding partners. Plus, major players in the tech, healthcare, and science industry are acting as supporting partners, including Google, Amazon, Ilumina, Ancestry, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Exact Sciences, Twist Bioscience, Opentrons, Centerview Partners, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and Testing For America. Plus, California's Governor Gavin Newsom offered up his support.

"Competition is the key to innovation 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,” said Newsom in a press statement.

Teams keen to apply for the prize can consider four categories — at home, point-of-care, distributed lab, or high-throughput lab — and will be judged by ease-of-use, cost, innovation, performance, turnaround time, scaling potential, and frequency. And to diversify the supply chain, teams are encouraged to work with a few different testing approaches. Deadline is Aug. 31.

If $5 million doesn't sound like a lot in the scheme of things, XPrize is backing this up with the COVID Apollo Project, a $50 million endeavor that will market and scale the best ideas from the competition, working with investors like RA Capital, Bain Capital, and Perceptive Advisors, alongside OpenCovid Screen.

"We need solutions that are frequent, fast turnaround, cheap, and easy ('FFCE'), and that are supply chain diverse," said Jeff Huber, president and co-founder of OpenCovidScreen, in a press statement. "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."

But remember, testing is just one, albeit crucial means of controlling the virus. The others: social distancing, washing your hands, and wearing face masks in public.