New incentives offered for solutions to current biomedical challenges

Innocentive, an open innovation company, has opened up new challenges in the field of biomedicine on its website. Among them are to find:

• urinary biomarkers for lupus nephritis
• novel therapeutic concepts to treat cancer
• novel detection technologies for cellular metabolites
• non-destructive delivery of macromolecules to live tissues
• predictive models for segmentation of populations (for applications in clinical trials for drug development)

• strategies to maintain fully differentiated human primary renal proximal tubular epithelial cells
• strategies for differentiation of renal proximal tubular cells from hES or hiPS cells

If you or your laboratory are planning or currently working on brilliant solutions to these challenges, you have a big chance to win 10,000-50,000 US dollars, or even up to 1,000,000 US dollars.

Companies that tie up with Innocentive provide these incentives to chosen solvers. Deadlines for submitting your solutions are provided in the Innocentive website.


About Innocentive:

InnoCentive is an "open innovation" company that takes research and development problems in a broad range of domains such as engineering, computer science, math, chemistry, life sciences, physical sciences and business and frames them as "challenge problems" for anyone to solve them. It gives cash awards for the best solutions to solvers who meet the challenge criteria.

InnoCentive is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. InnoCentive calls the scientists who attempt the problems "solvers" and the companies these problems come from as "seekers". As of 2008 InnoCentive has 64 of these "seekers" (including Procter & Gamble, Dow AgroSciences and Eli Lilly), which have posted more than 800 "challenges" in 40 disciplines, including chemistry, life sciences, business and entrepreneurship, computer science and clean technology. Of these, more than 348 have been solved by over 165,000 "solvers".

Solutions have come from United States, Europe, Russia, China, India and Argentina; the cash awards for solving challenge problems are typically in the $10,000 to $100,000 range. To date, over $3 million in awards have been awarded to solvers.

The idea for InnoCentive came to Alpheus Bingham and Aaron Schacht in 1998 while they worked together at Eli Lilly and Company. They brainstormed the idea for Innocentive (what they originally dubbed "Bounty Chem") during a session that was focused on exploring application of the Internet to business. The company was launched in 2001 by Jill Panetta, Jeff Hensley, Darren Carroll and Alpheus Bingham, with majority seed funding from Eli Lilly and Company.

In December 2006 the company signed an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to add a non-profit area designed to generate science and technology solutions to pressing problems in the developing world.

As of early 2007, InnoCentive's Web site features an award from the non-profit Prize4Life foundation for $1 million for finding a biomarker that measures ALS disease progression.


Material reposted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons License.