ChromaCode Selected as a Winner of $6M XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing Competition

CARLSBAD, Calif., March 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ChromaCode, Inc. today announced that the company has been selected as a Main Track Winning Team in the XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing competition, which aims to increase COVID-19 testing capabilities 100-times past the current standard. XPRIZE is the world's leader in designing and implementing innovative competition models to solve the world's grandest challenges. After making through multiple selection gates from an original pool of about 700 applicants, 219 semi-finalists and 20 finalists, ChromaCode was one of 5 companies selected as an XPRIZE winner.

"We're honored to be recognized by the XPRIZE committee after several rounds of review and testing. It's not often one's technology platform is put through such a rigorous, independent side-by-side analysis versus competitors. Our unique platform, powered by a combination of chemistry and cloud analytics, performed extraordinarily well and demonstrated our ability to scale and deploy accurate, rapid, and affordable COVID-19 testing," said Greg Gosch, ChromaCode's Co-founder, President and CEO.

"XPRIZE Rapid Covid Testing asked innovators across the world to develop fast, frequent, cheap and easy COVID testing solutions. ChromaCode was able to surpass all judging criteria with an innovative, scalable multiplexed solution that has the potential to help millions," said Jeff Huber, President & Co-Founder of OpenCovidScreen.

ChromaCode's HDPCR™️— or high-definition PCR — platform provides a 5x expansion of the analytical capacity of any PCR instrument. The proprietary technology uses digital signal processing, enhanced PCR reagents and cloud-based analytics to significantly increase test capabilities while decreasing costs. The platform leverages the agility, security, and breadth and depth of Amazon Web Services (AWS) services to enable real-time access to the data required to support accurate and affordable COVID-19 testing.  

"Our cloud-based analytics platform, powered by AWS, uniquely enables real-time monitoring of millions of data points from labs in broad geographies. This vast database allows us to instantly assess performance of our products and the instruments they run on, quickly detect and resolve technical issues, evaluate epidemiological trends, and inform on new product development," said Chris MacDonald, Vice President of Operations & Data Science at ChromaCode. "The ChromaCode Cloud™ also offers labs instant deployment. Using a standard web browser and our proprietary reagents, any lab with a qPCR instrument can be up and running with a new high-throughput test literally overnight."

With detailed customer data from more than 3 million COVID-19 tests hosted on its ChromaCode Cloud™️ platform, ChromaCode aims to assist other emerging test makers to help scale their tests by hosting them on the platform, which provides remote access to streamlined data analysis and customer reporting capabilities.

"We've seen healthcare organizations across the globe lean on technology and the cloud to get accurate, trusted information to patients, and to quickly support COVID-19 testing, diagnosis, and vaccine development," said Brian Donnelly, Worldwide Leader of Diagnostics & Genomics at AWS. "AWS is proud to collaborate with ChromaCode on the development of the ChromaCode Cloud™️ platform, which enabled them to rapidly and cost-effectively scale their HDPCR™️ COVID-19 testing solution and played a key role in their XPRIZE award. We look forward to supporting ChromaCode as they scale beyond three million tests and work to provide accurate and affordable COVID-19 testing in additional countries."

A portion of the proceeds will be used to further expand ChromaCode's product menu to include detection of emerging strain variants, a critical public health need. The Company also plans to support the country's efforts to return to normal life by subsidizing tests for local schools and businesses that would otherwise not have sound testing programs.

About ChromaCode
ChromaCode is a diagnostic platform company that meshes proprietary reagents with scalable cloud analytics to dramatically improve clinical molecular analysis. The company's unique core of data scientists and molecular biologists leverage patented mathematical methods and algorithms to extract new information from biochemistry reactions. This approach substantially increases the performance capabilities of today's gold-standard molecular diagnostics instruments at a very low cost. For more information, visit ChromaCode.com.

About XPRIZE
XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement of over 1M people and rising, delivering truly radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. XPRIZE inspires and empowers a global community of problem-solvers to positively impact our world by crowdsourcing solutions through large-scale competitions, tackling the world's grandest challenges in exploration, environment and human equity. Active competitions include the $100 Million XPRIZE Carbon Removal with Elon Musk, $20 Million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, $15 Million XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion, $10 Million XPRIZE Rainforest, $10 Million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, $6 Million XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing, $5 Million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling and $500,000 Pandemic Response Challenge. Donate, sign up or join a team at xprize.org.

SOURCE ChromaCode