 Hi, I'm Dr. Daniel Kraft. I'm the chair of the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance, and I'm really lucky to be joined by Jeff Huber, the founder of OpenCovidScreen and Professor Chris Mason from Wild Cornell Medical Center. We've just sort of wrapped the announcement of the winners for the XPRIZE for rapid COVID screening, for fast, frequent, cheap, and easy COVID screening. And we're going to have a quick discussion about what we've learned, what surprises about, and something about the winners. So let me pitch it over to Jeff, who really got this whole amazing XPRIZE started. Jeff. Thanks, Daniel. Yeah, the genesis of this was recognizing the critical need for innovation around testing that is frequent, fast, and around, cheap, and easy. And the competition has been an amazing success from the initial over 700 teams that signed up to over 200 finalists to the nine winners that we announced. And it was a very rigorous process that included distributed proficiency testing over 200 samples or 200 samples into each of the teams, give us great quantitative analytical data, then rigorous clinical testing that was run by Chris Mason and his team, very expertly, to lead to these fantastic set of winners. Five, they're sharing our $5 million prize purse. And then four, annual innovation, they're sharing a million dollar prize. And Chris, we had an interesting process here to test the testing. Maybe run through what the opportunity challenge was and some of the lessons learned. Yeah, happy to. So it was really, as you've said, at pandemic speeds, we had to get things together quickly, get basically aliquots of titrated known pathogens, not only of synthesized amounts of SARS-CoV-2, but other related pathogens that could make false positives on tests or different matrices, like doing it in saliva versus nasopharyngeal swab matrix, like a VTM, or even just in buffers. So we really wanted to build out these plates where we send them blinded to all the different teams and they don't know what's in them and we have to see how well they do. And actually some did extraordinarily well and some did really awful. So those ones didn't go forward. But we really saw that people came through with some really innovative tests from all over the map, really. Everything from testing your olfactory neurons that are popping up in your nose or throat to PCR and antigen tests. Even an MRI machine was in one of them. So really a really broad range of innovative ideas were brought to the table, which is great. And the trick was to be not just sensitive and specific but frequent, cheap, easy. Jeff... Frequent, fast, cheap, and easy. What does that really mean in the context? And what are the implications of that for testing, not just for COVID, but maybe other next pandemics or diseases? Yeah, and I mean, that was part of the inspiration for the competition from the beginning of, it's clear that this COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on the world and society. But in a lot of respects, this is almost a practice pandemic. Imagine what could have happened if the lethality would have been five or 10 times as great. And there's potential out there for other zoonotic viruses pandemics to come. COVID-19 is just one in the series. And also we're still battling COVID-19 of other variants that could develop that are even more challenging. So really this innovation was, yes, to have an impact on COVID-19 and given the pace of it, we still have a lot left to go on the runway with COVID-19. It's great that we have vaccines coming along, but with the evolution of variants and getting all seven billion people in the world vaccinated, there's going to be time that testing is really the solution, the thing that provides the safety net to get us out the other side of this. But with others to come, now with this innovation, we're equipped from the beginning to have frequent, fast, cheap and easy testing to do a much better job for the challenges that we'll face in the future. And Chris, putting your scientist and entrepreneur hat on, where might you see the future two, five years from now with the ability to have testing, molecular and otherwise, in our pockets, in our smartphones and connected back to public health? I think it's really a brave new world and a brave, much more quantified and accurate and responsive world ahead of us. So this includes, as we've seen from some of the innovations in this XPRIZE, point of care testing, home testing, things that you can do very quickly, very cheaply, the frequent, fast, cheap and easy. And really, I think it's gonna be that there's gonna be the convenience of it of having your home is not just about easiness, but also it's the safest way to do testing. So instead of having to go somewhere to get a test where you are probably coughing and infectious, you do it right in the comfort and ease of your own home. And so it is gonna bring some of the convenience we've began to view pregnancy testing to the molecular diagnostics realm of infectious disease, which is desperately needed. And I think it also gives people a sense of agency. They can tell when they're sick and they can have a quantified test to say, I'm definitely staying home from work today. I know I'm sick, here's the results, you could maybe share it. And also it helps with the genetic epidemiology. As soon as it's positive, we start to look at sequencing methods. You can capture that virus, use it to design new vaccines to track how a virus is evolving or any pathogen. And I'm hoping that we'll see more and more of that. And this XPRIZE took something that was sort of a slow brewing process and really ramped it up fast. So I'm excited to see more and more companies like this deploy tests on the market and it'd be embedded more into the epidemiology as well. And it might go beyond infectious diseases to non-infectious, so that's another element. Maybe to close out, we don't need just nine winning teams, which you can reach via the link we'll be sharing. Maybe what are some of the surprises? What are your favorite elements that came out of this? And what might be the implications for testing and even prizes in the future? Go for it, Chris. Yeah, I guess I'll go first. I think it's really interesting, like the phenotype of anosmia where people lost their sense of smell is unique to this coronavirus. And so I think it's, we don't know if that'll be relevant for necessarily other viruses, but it might be relevant for other diseases because the nose knows, as a lot of people say, it really has an interesting, it itself is a phenotype. And when you smell in the degree which you can smell things and the loss of that smell, all are informative. So I think what's interesting is we've now seen things like the use-smell-it test, which has an app and a series of strips and then you can learn a lot about the functioning of the neurons that are right in your nose and also what's happening also chemically in your brain, like how are those messages being received? So I think that was certainly unique to this virus so far, but it certainly can apply to other possible diseases. And I think the thing that really resonated for me is just the diversity of solutions. Part of the design of this competition was in recognition that there is no silver bullet. Everybody wants a silver bullet, there isn't. We need a variety of solutions. We need supply chain diverse solutions. We need things that work for different use cases and the diversity of solutions represented from testing types of PCR based and LAMP based and antigen based and new innovations in the open innovation category and things that are working in the lab and things that are working in the home and instant results and next morning results, all of those together are what it takes to battle and fight this. And I think the collective public health impact is really profound. The goal is to be able to catch occurrences before they become outbreaks and to stop transmission chains. And these are the kind of tools and technologies and innovation that make that happen for COVID-19 and for future pandemics to come. Yeah, spot on COVID certainly been a catalyst. You know, just like spot next to the space age, COVID is sparking a bit of a health age and things like this XPRIZE, which you know, it tries to trigger audacious but achievable challenges and speed them up, you know, has long term implications like the very first I'm sorry XPRIZE help catalyze opening up space. And now we see SpaceX and others and I think hopefully what emerges from this prize and others like it will really catalyze a future of health, medicine, diagnostics that will benefit everybody. So, the closing line of COVID-19. Exactly. So for those of you listening, you can learn more about this particular XPRIZE at XPRIZE.org slash testing. You can learn more about the winning teams. You can help support them going forward from funding to testing sites to regulatory. There's a lot of potential to keep collaborating here or still in the midst of the journey to help address this pandemic and prevent future ones. Thanks for joining us. Thanks.