The X Prize Foundation – Democratizing access to healthcare
Many of us have found ways to contribute to healthcare in the developing world by volunteering time and energy or donating old equipment or opened but unused supplies. But one organization is working to improve healthcare worldwide on a much larger scale, with the same pioneering technology that could usher in a modern era of personalized care here in the U.S.
The X Prize Foundation’s Life Sciences Group is a nonprofit whose goal is to stimulate medical breakthroughs that will improve healthcare worldwide – in areas such as bionics, stem cell research and medical technology that will facilitate personalized medicine. In particular, the agency is working to bring new technologies that will enable comprehensive healthcare to communities in the developing world.
The organization raises money for specific projects, such as the Archon Genomics project: the use of genetic information to predict disease susceptibility and guide proactive care. Then, the money is awarded as an X Prize to the organization deemed most likely to succeed in fulfilling that goal. The Archon Genomics X Prize will be awarded to the first team to sequence 100 genomes within 10 days, both inexpensively and accurately. According to the X Prize website, the Archon Genomics X Prize “will usher in a new era of preventative and personalized medicine by challenging scientists and engineers to create better, cheaper and faster ways to sequence genomes.”
“Traditional funding routes aren’t causing the kinds of breakthroughs that we think should happen” in fields like intractable diseases and artificial intelligence, says Eileen Bartholomew, Vice-President of Prize Development at the X Prize Foundation in Los Angeles.
Although Bartholomew acknowledges that traditional corporate R&D and government funding “go a long way towards making breakthroughs,” life sciences X Prizes help drive innovation worldwide with a bigger bounty on technology that helps operate in the gaps that corporate and government funding have left.
“Health is universal, she says. “Those [prizes] are really about empowering consumers for information; empowering people for health information; having more information about your body state, metrics, and conditions at your own hands. All of those things are global issues.”
X-Prize competitions like the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize and the Nokia Sensing X Challenge have inspired 300 teams from 30 countries worldwide. The thinking, Bartholomew says, is that with the proper financial incentive, developmental teams will emerge from nontraditional sources, bringing with them perspectives that might not have otherwise been considered.
“Whether you’re in the U.S. or China or India, the access to the tools you need to innovate are becoming more widespread,” Bartholomew says. “You are empowering people to have access to information, technology and systems that before were only available to an elite few. Many of the Life Sciences X Prizes operate by the same philosophy: that by empowering individuals with information about their genome, disease susceptibility and health care history, they can implement preventive measures and improve the quality of their care.
Improving care with personalized medicine has been discussed since the advent of the EMR in the U.S. But that kind of information has the potential to exponentially improve healthcare in the developing world as well.
Bartholomew says X Prize funding will ensure that research is performed “at scale to make sure that personalized medicine isn’t just something that shows up on PowerPoint slides.”
“The average person now with a smartphone in Africa has access to more information than President Clinton did when he was in office,” she says. “We are democratizing access in a way that is no more relevant than in the medical state, where access to information and R&D dollars was based on history, legacy and reputation. We’re starting to see those barriers crumble.”
For example, Bartholomew points out, crowd-sourced funding is starting to be called in to kick-start biomarker studies for which researchers can’t get NIH funding. That’s an approach that, until very recently, nobody may have thought possible. And it’s just one example of the way that healthcare in developing nations may be poised for change.
“Every approach really has a time and a place,” Bartholomew says. “When we launch an X Prize, the type of criteria we look to see the outcome of this prize as creating are things that are problems. But we’re also looking to break down barriers to industry breakthroughs or catalyzation.”
“To survive, we have to imagine that tomorrow is going to be a lot like today,” Bartholomew says. “[But] the world is not linear; the world is exponential. Things come up that are overnight successes because we are not paying attention to the growth of things.”
“We are not interested in stepchange. We look at things that affect humanity on a global scale and whose outcome addresses breakthrough on a global scale. It is not just the technology. It is also the awareness of what can happen,” she says.
One of the things that X Prize wants to make happen is an expansion of its projects beyond U.S. borders, into areas of the world that need “relevant and meaningful” solutions to healthcare problems rooted in poverty, generational gaps in technology, or a lack of access to the kinds of resources that could address them. And at the root of its approach is the use of competition to engender innovation throughout Europe, India and Asia.
“It’s not just about the better mousetrap,” Bartholomew says. “It’s about the mechanisms of the supply chain that service that mousetrap. A lot of the key success factors that we look at in trying to make a prize successful are looking at those factors in addition to a technology breakthrough.”
“A lot of the prizes that we are focusing on are really looking at taking some of the advances that have happened within some of those systems but breaking them open and distributing them at a scale and a size,” she says.
Some of the technologies that could play a role in the next generation of healthcare development, include miniaturization, collaborative computing, A.I.; things that “take and disrupt old mechanisms of diagnosing, imaging and receiving care,” she says.
“We think that the future of that market may look like maintaining small-scale computing devices that are in everyone’s hands, homes and cars,” Bartholomew says. “It’s a market at scale that is not really imagined today.”
X-Prize is currently hosting three active competitions in the healthcare space: The Archon Genomics X Prize, the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize and the Nokia Sensing X Challenge.
The Qualcomm and Nokia challenges will “reward breakthroughs Highly tested…always trusted medical imaging parts in sensing health information,” she says; “advancing the way we track body metrics and information, how we leverage big data and AI to understand trends in large-scale public health issues.”
And it’s not like winning an X Prize means that a team loses out on manufacturing or marketing the technology it develops, Bartholomew says. Teams retain their own intellectual property, she says, because “sponsors are interested in advancing the prizes in toto.”
“They’re helping to co-catalyze the industry,” she says. “There’s a lot of brand value that’s associated with that from a support in actually recognizing that this industry is important.”