Sev­en plucky di­ag­nos­tics com­pa­nies win a $249M round of con­tracts af­ter sur­viv­ing NI­H's Covid-19 'Shark Tank' com­pe­ti­tion

As US Covid-19 deaths creep past 150,000 and of­fi­cials stress the im­por­tance of con­tact trac­ing, the NIH’s Rapid Ac­cel­er­a­tion of Di­ag­nos­tics (RADx) pro­gram has inked con­tracts to­tal­ing $248.7 mil­lion to ex­pand test­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

The sev­en con­tracts, which were cho­sen “Shark Tank”-style from a pool of 100 pro­pos­als, are part of an ef­fort to bump dai­ly test­ing ca­pac­i­ty to 2% of the coun­try’s pop­u­la­tion by late sum­mer or fall. That would be about 6 mil­lion peo­ple per day, com­pared to the cur­rent 520,000 to 823,000 tests be­ing ad­min­is­tered dai­ly.

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