La Jolla Firm Named Winner In $6M Coronavirus Testing Contest

LA JOLLA, CA — Four California tech companies were among the top five winning teams in the XPRIZE $6 million Rapid COVID Testing competition Tuesday. One of the winners was the La Jolla Institute for Immunology.

XPRIZE, a prominent technology contest organizer based in Los Angeles, launched a worldwide challenge last July to find innovators who could develop a fast, affordable and easy coronavirus test to meet a demand for testing as the virus quickly circled the globe.

Carlsbad firms ChromaCode and Reliable-LFC were also among the five winners in the U.S., along with Alveo Technologies in Alameda and Mirimus in Brooklyn.

"California innovation and ingenuity strikes again," Gov. Gavin Newsom said, tweeting about the contest Wednesday morning.

Each team had to develop tests that had a maximum turnaround time of 12 hours to deliver results, according to XPRIZE.

The La Jolla Institute of Immunology was awarded for its coronavirus test product. The firm will get $500,000 upfront and could receive another $500,000 each over the next few months if it is able to successfully mass-produce its product.

When the pandemic closed laboratories around the world last year, the institute's team set to work on their rapid, saliva test, according to their website.

"The team worked so hard," said Dr. Stephen Wilson, executive vice president and chief operating officer at LJI, in a December news release. "This was an everyday, all-day effort to go from concept to assay to a system we could actually use."

Wilson explained that his team's test doesn't rely on scarce supplies.

"We knew the protocol needed to be so simple that anyone who follows the directions could get basic supplies and do it — so that more labs can have the confidence to do this sort of thing," he said in a statement.

The institute urges that their test only uses a small saliva sample, rather than a deep nasal swab or blood — making the test affordable, safe and speedy.

Reliable-LFC launched just last year, tossing its hat in ring to fill a desperate void for more coronavirus testing in California. The company's V-CHEK wireless diagnostic test can give results in 10 minutes, according to the company.

ChromaCode says their high-definition PCR test, which uses cloud-based analytics, is faster and cheaper than the average test on the market. The company said a portion of its winnings will be used to develop tools that detect coronavirus variants.

The contest drew over 700 competing teams, which was narrowed down to 219 semifinalists. In December, XPRIZE announced 20 finalists that had to send testing kits to laboratories for clinical validation.

A panel of judges — made up of healthcare workers and experts — reviewed each testing platform.

Beyond the contest, a $50 million COVID Apollo Project lead by a coalition of science investors will conjoin with OpenCovidScreen and XPRIZE to help accelerate "the best ideas, technologies and innovations to market and scale them," according to XPRIZE.

"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 Jeff Huber, president and co-founder of OpenCovidScreen, in a statement.

The winning teams of the contest were:

• Reliable LFC, LLC, Antigen Testing, Carlsbad
• ChromaCode, RNA Testing, Carlsbad
• Mirimus, RNA Testing, Brooklyn
• La Jolla Institute for Immunology, RNA Testing, La Jolla
• Alveo Technologies, RNA Testing, Alameda