Chordoma Foundation aims to spur development
of new cell lines with $10,000 prize
Ask any chordoma researcher what he or she needs to make progress towards a cure and chances are the answer will include more chordoma cell lines. Cell lines are live tumor cells grown perpetually in a laboratory, and are used for a wide range of different experiments, including testing the effectiveness of drugs before treating people. Currently there is only one valid chordoma cell line available for researchers to use, so new cell lines are urgently needed to develop new treatments for chordoma patients.
Unfortunately, creating chordoma cell lines has proven to be a major challenge; over the past three years at least a dozen labs have tried unsuccessfully to develop chordoma cell lines. What’s needed are new approaches, and many more opportunities for chance successes - the more researchers who try their hand at creating chordoma cell lines, the more likely some will succeed.
In order to spur the development of cell lines urgently needed to advance research, the Chordoma Foundation is now offering up to ten $10,000 prizes for each new chordoma cell line. We hope this prize will entice new researchers to try their luck at creating chordoma cell lines, and will encourage novel and unconventional approaches to solving this problem.
Because the success of any prize depends on reaching the right audience of problem solvers, we have partnered with Innocentive – a global marketplace that connects solution seekers with over 200,000 interested scientists – to market and administer the prize. Innocentive is generously donating its services to the Chordoma Foundation as part of its public good campaign; a program designed to harness the power of scientists around the world to solve some of humanities toughest problems.
If you have any questions about the prize, or have a cell line you would like to submit, please email
josh@chordoma.org.
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About InnoCentive, Inc.
Since 2001, InnoCentive has helped corporate, government, and non-profit organizations to better innovate through crowdsourcing, strategic consulting services and internal Software-as-a-Service offerings. The company built the first global Web community for open innovation where organizations or "Seekers" submit complex problems or "Challenges" for resolution to a "Solver" community of more than 200,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, business professionals, and research organizations in more than 200 countries. Prizes for winning solutions are financial awards up to US $1,000,000. Committed to unleashing diverse thinking, InnoCentive continues to introduce new products and services exemplifying a new corporate model where return to investors and individual passion go hand in hand with solving mankind's most pressing problems.
http://www.innocentive.com/