OpenCovidScreen Foundation
COLLECTIVE
covid-19
Fiscal Host: OpenCovidScreen Foundation
Driving Frequent, Fast Turn-Around, Cheap & Easy ("FFCE") Screening for Safe Return-to-Work & School. More at OpenCovidScreen.org; whitepaper at http://bit.ly/waldotest.
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About
Problem: COVID-19 is a highly contagious pandemic disease whose hallmark is asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread. The economic & societal impact has been massive and will continue until there is an effective, widely available vaccine; this will take at least a year and possibly more. Clinical molecular testing to-date is expensive ($100+/result), slow turn-around (days), supply chain limited, and focused on symptomatic patients. Unfortunately, no commercially available test delivers the necessary properties for a safe Return-to-Work/School today.
Solution: The fastest & highest leverage way to return our economy and society to functioning is with test-enabled safe Return-to-Work/School and hotspot programs that catch inevitable occurrences before they become outbreaks, and to enable ”Test-Trace-Isolate” (TTI) that works.
These surveillance/screening results must embody “FFCE” properties to provide the needed safety net:
- Frequent – at least weekly (with sub-sampling to approximate 4 days or less)
- Fast Turn-Around – “next morning” results (or faster)
- Cheap – “less than the price of a latte” (target of <$5/result, to enable self-funding)
- Easy – self-collection: saliva-based or AN swab
Asymptomatic & pre-symptomatic surveillance/screening tests can be done effectively at much lower cost and higher distributed scale than traditional ‘clinical’ testing — rapidly identifying ‘candidate positive’ subjects for clinical testing/follow-up, and triggering trace & isolation protocols.
Next step: XPRIZE, in partnership with OpenCovidScreen, is running the COVID-19 Rapid Testing XPRIZE competition in July-September 2020 to catalyze innovation to create safe Return-to-Work/School programs that leverage ‘open source’, accurate, easy-to-use, supply-chain-diverse assays (PCR, LAMP, CRISPR, sequencing & ‘open innovation’ categories) that achieve all FFCE properties. The winning assays will complete professional clinical validation exceeding FDA EUA process, and have full categorization of sensitivity, specificity, & limit of detection (LoD), with documented procedures for distributed, consistent implementation. The competition is followed by pilots and scale deployments to drive immediate, sustained impact, both locally and globally.
Our team
Jeff Huber
Admin
Nancy O'Neil
Admin