San Diego’s Assay Depot, which operates an online marketplace for the life sciences industry, and the nonprofit Rare Genomics Institute say they have joined with 19 life sciences companies in creating a “Rare Disease Science Challenge.”
The sponsoring organizations are offering as much as $400,000 in laboratory services, technology, and other resources—along with a $10,000 cash prize for the winning proposal. Guidelines call for researchers at nonprofit institutions to submit an online proposal for conducting research into a rare disease. Submissions will be evaluated by an expert scientific panel, which may award one or more donated services needed for the scientists to carry out the work. The deadline for submitting proposals is Dec. 15.
Top proposals selected by the panel also will be eligible on Facebook for voting by the rare disease community for the $10,000 prize. Finalists will be announced on Feb. 28, 2013, World Rare Disease Day.
Organizers say rare diseases affect over 25 million Americans, yet less than five percent of the 7,000 known rare diseases have any therapy. The Rare Genomics Institute, based in St. Louis, provides an expert network and an online crowdfunding mechanism to help families design and fund research in diseases that would not otherwise be studied.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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