4 CA Firms Named Winners In $6M Coronavirus Testing Contest

LOS ANGELES, CA — Four California tech companies were among the top five winning teams in the XPRIZE $6 million Rapid COVID Testing competition Tuesday, officials announced.

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

XPRIZE, a prominent technology contest organizer based in Los Angeles, launched a worldwide challenge last July to put companies to the task of developing fast, affordable and user-friendly coronavirus tests to meet surging demand for testing.

Three of the four Golden State firms are headquartered in San Diego County — ChromaCode, the La Jolla Institute of Immunology and Reliable-LFC. A fourth, Alveo Technologies, is located in Alameda. Another company that shared the top prize was Mirimus, located in Brooklyn.

Each team had to develop a test that could deliver results in 12 hours or less, according to XPRIZE.

The five winning companies will each get $500,000 upfront and could receive another $500,000 each over the next few months if they manage to successfully mass-produce their testing kits.

When the pandemic closed laboratories around the world last year, the La Jolla team said it went straight 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 Alameda firm's be.well test recently won approval in the United Kingdom, the European Union and several Scandinavian countries, the company said in a statement.

Now, it is in the process of seeking emergency use authorization from the federal government to place it on the market in the U.S.

"The market for rapid COVID-19 tests has thus far been defined by high costs, low accessibility, long times to treatment and inconsistent performance," said Alveo Technology's chief financial officer Julianne Averill in a statement.

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.

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