New York (October 26, 2011) — The X PRIZE Foundation today announced a number of major changes to its Archon Genomics X PRIZE, the $10 million competition designed to drive breakthroughs in the future of predictive and personalized medicine to make significant advances in human genome sequencing. Medco Health Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: MHS), a leading pharmacy benefit manager, has joined as the competition’s Presenting Sponsor. The X PRIZE Foundation and Medco stated the competing teams will sequence 100 genomes of centenarians.
This competition, whose purse and partial operations are underwritten by a generous grant from Dr. Stewart and Marilyn Blusson, will now be renamed the Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Medco®.
Through advanced competition guidelines, the Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Medco will measure teams on accuracy, cost, speed and completeness of genome sequencing. The competition’s audacious target criteria for accuracy and completeness of sequencing will define for the first time a “medical grade” genome.
