The XPRIZE Foundation has announced the winners of a $6 million competition aimed at accelerating the development of affordable rapid COVID-19 tests.

Launched last July in partnership with OpenCovidScreen, the competition, which drew seven hundred applicants, sought solutions for a rapid COVID-19 screening test that costs less than $15, produces results in under twelve hours, and uses minimally invasive sampling techniques. An independent panel announced the names of the twenty finalists in December and, following a clinical validation process, selected five winning teams. The winning teams, which will each receive $1 million, are Reliable LFC (Carlsbad, California), for its antigen test, and ChromaCode (Carlsbad), Mirimus (Brooklyn, New York), La Jolla Institute for Immunology (La Jolla, California), and Alveo Technologies (Alameda, California) for their RNA tests. All five winning teams will work to accelerate and scale the adoption of their solutions, while XPRIZE will oversee the development of a multimedia campaign documenting the test protocols, implementation plans, and lessons learned.

In addition to the five winning solutions, the panel selected Open Innovation Track (OIT) winners — four teams whose approaches demonstrated great potential but could not be categorized as either a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), isothermal amplification, next-generation sequencing, or antigen detection solution and could not be tested through the different rounds of the competition. The OIT winners are Steradian Technologies, Inc. (Houston, Texas), U-smell-it (Guilford, Connecticut), Ram Global (Zweibrücken, Germany), and TeraGroup (Herzliya, Israel).

Part of the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance, which was created to bring researchers, innovators, institutions, corporations, and governments together to share ideas and resources in the fight against the current and future pandemics, the XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing competition was supported by Anthem, Inc. and the Anthem Foundation.

"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, en masse and at-scale," said OpenCovidScreen president and co-founder Jeff Huber. "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."

(Image credit: CEPI)