NIH "shark tank" week yields 7 COVID-19 diagnostic testing companies now awarded $2.5 million to scale up rapid lab and point-of-care testing.
As the need for fast, accessible, affordable COVID-19 diagnostics grows more urgent, the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently selected 100 of the best concepts submitted in response to its call for rapid, easy-to-use testing technology and put the sponsors through a one-week "shark tank" evaluation process.
The result? Seven biomedical tech companies will receive a total of $248.7 million in federal funding to accelerate scaleup of new point-of-care (POC) and laboratory-based tehcnologies. The short slide show below offerers a quick look at the 3 focsed on expanding POC testing for COVID-19 and the 4 that plan to increase US lab-based diagnostic capacity to as high as millions per day by the end of 2020.