European Commission to offer €1M for common cold test

€1 million will be awarded to the person or team that develops a rapid test to tell whether a patient needs to be treated with antibiotics or not for certain common cold symptoms, in the first EU innovation prize competition of 2015.

The test is for upper respiratory tract infections, which the Commission said includes pharyngitis, sinusitis, otitis as well as bronchitis. These infections are a major reason for the prescription of antibiotics, even though many of them are caused by viruses, where antibiotics are neither effective nor necessary.

Doctors would use the test to quickly diagnose whether patients with these infections can be treated without antibiotics.

The overall aim is to contribute to the movement to stop the overuse of antibiotics and halt the growing antimicrobial resistance that the Commission says results in 25,000 avoidable deaths and over €1.5 billion in healthcare expenses each year.

The Commission will receive applications from 10 March. The deadline for submission is August 2016.

Five prizes

This diagnostic test is one of five innovation prizes which will receive funding under the €80 billion Horizon 2020 research programme in 2015. The other open competitions are expected to cover transport, energy and materials, and renewable biological resources fields.

Prizes work in the same way as old “Wild West” reward posters, spurring activity by inviting people to join a particular search. They attract the attention of the public by making a positive noise about an important issue. If the objective is chosen carefully, they can also deliver far more bangs for the R&D buck.

In the case of the EU’s vaccines challenge prize rewarded last year, 49 teams registered to take part in the project, a level of resource that would have cost far more to marshal through grants.

In more recent years, innovation prizes have been increasingly offered by governments, private firms, and a variety of philanthropic institutions – ranging from NASA’s Centennial Challenges to prizes offered by the XPrize Foundation. In 2010 the US launched Challenge.gov, an online platform that allows federal agencies to submit problems and open calls for solutions from all interested parties.

UK innovation funder Nesta, in a report in 2012, commented that, “before 1991, 97 per cent of the prize money offered took the form of recognition prizes for past achievements. Since then, 78 per cent of new prize money has been offered for the future solution of problems."

If the 2015 challenges set by the Commission go well, subsequent prizes will be planned later in the 2016 – 2017 work programme.