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Quartzy Helps XPRIZE Teams Win the Rapid COVID-19 Testing Competition

Written by Sara Schonfeld | Apr 13, 2021 7:00:00 AM

Quartzy’s unique solution combining SaaS and e-commerce has transformed laboratory operations for organizations globally, ranging from academic labs to multinational organizations and Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies. By centralizing key tasks such as supply purchasing, procurement tracking, and inventory management, Quartzy helps scientists and lab managers spend more time on groundbreaking research and less on low-value administrative tasks, purchasing errors, and other barriers.

Outcomes from the Quartzy platform include:

  • 40% increase in laboratory productivity
  • 20% average cost savings
  • Increased resource utilization in the form of two to six additional hours per week for research activities (rather than administrative)

“In the age of COVID-19, time is of the essence. Faster, cheaper, and more accurate testing methods will save more lives while helping us better understand the prevalence and spread of the disease,” said Quartzy co-founder and CEO Jayant Kulkarni. “Our platform transforms laboratory operations for front-line researchers to eliminate time-consuming and manual processes, so they can focus on developing new and better testing methods.”

Quartzy’s efficiency gains were instrumental in helping three teams beat out over 700 submissions to win the coveted XPRIZE, totaling $6 million in funding.

“We’ve learned in a pandemic that supply chains are a nightmare,” said Suzanne Alarcon, manager of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology Next Generation Sequencing Core, an XPRIZE Grand Prize Winner. “We’re keeping an eye on the emerging pandemic variants to ensure we have the right primers and probes ready to stay ahead of the game.  Making sure we have what we need to conduct critical research in the lab is where Quartzy really helps improve our productivity.”

Prem Premsrirut, founder and CEO of Mirimus—another XPRIZE Grand Prize Winner—cited three significant aspects of their COVID-19 testing methodology: fast turn-around times, cost minimization, and simplified sample collection. 

“We employ data pool gathering to expedite results for up to five thousand people in one cycle, and we hope to bring attention to this method and teach it to other test processing labs so that they can go from processing 20 thousand a day to two million a day.” Premsrirut explained. “Quartzy helped keep our labs organized and supplied with the right items, which was instrumental in helping us to win the XPRIZE.”

Get a demo to see Quartzy in action and trial our platform free for 30 days -  quartzy.com/demo