Cambia Health Solutions Announces Participation in XPRIZE Coalition Offering $5 Million, Accelerating Safe Reopening of Schools and Workplaces

PORTLAND, Ore., July 28, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Cambia Health Solutions, in collaboration with XPRIZE, OpenCovidScreen, Anthem, Inc. and other innovative organizations, today announced the $5 million XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing Competition to accelerate the development of affordable, accurate and efficient COVID-19 testing.

"Navigating this new era of COVID-19 requires us all to work together with a shared commitment to the health and well-being of people and families," said Cambia Health Solutions CEO Mark Ganz. "Cambia joins this coalition to drive the innovation we need to bring affordable, rapid and accurate testing of this virus. We are stronger when we work together."

Over a six-month period, the XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing competition will encourage the world's most innovative individuals and organizations to develop new testing methods that embody four principles:

• Frequent: allowing for necessary testing at least weekly
• Fast turn-around: maximum 12 hours from sample to result
• Cost effective: an affordable price point for consumers
• Easy: the ability for self-collection

Currently, most available COVID-19 tests take several days to obtain results, are expensive, invasive, and limited due to supply chain issues. XPRIZE Rapid Covid Testing aims to meet the need to scale testing capabilities by 100-times the current standard, the level of increase needed to more safely return to everyday activities. Having more affordable testing and obtaining results faster may help lead to more people being tested as well as better, data-driven contact tracing and isolating strategies.

Teams can compete in one of the following four categories: at home, point-of-care, distributed lab, or central lab. To ensure supply chain diverse solutions, entries are encouraged in a variety of underlying testing approaches (PCR, Isothermal/LAMP/RPA, CRISPR, Antigen-detection, Next Generation Sequencing, and other technologies). Entries will be judged on overall innovation of solution, appropriate performance, turnaround time, scaling properties and frequency enabled, ease-of-use and cost of solution.

Cambia Executive Medical Director Dr. Amy Khan will join XPRIZE as an Advisory Board member, supporting XPRIZE in evaluating innovations presented using her clinical expertise and health care background.

Potential competitors, whether a team or an individual looking for a team, should visit xprize.org/covidtesting to register, access all the resources available and read the competition guidelines. Registration is $100 and ends August 31, 2020.

Cambia Health Solutions is a founding partner of the coalition. Other founding partners include Blue Shield of California, Health Care Service Corporation, Florida Blue, Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Jersey, Google Health, Ilumina, Amazon, Exact Sciences, Twist Biosciences, and Opentrons. Founding anchor partners of XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing are Anthem Foundation and Anthem, Inc.

About Cambia Health Solutions

Cambia Health Solutions, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, is dedicated to transforming health care. We put people at the heart of everything we do as we work to make the health care system more economically-sustainable and efficient for people and their families. Our company reaches over 80 million Americans nationwide, including more than three million people in the Pacific Northwest who are enrolled in our regional health plans. To learn more about us, visit CambiaHealth.com or Twitter.com/cambia.  

SOURCE Cambia Health Solutions