The UK-based competition is investing a £5.7 million ($8 million) charitable pledged prize fund into one grand prize winner, two second prize winners, and five third prize winners.

June 25, 2021

Hyderabad: Hyderabad and Singapore headquartered blockchain company StaTwig has emerged as one of the eight winners of The Trinity Challenge (TTC), winning a prize of $660,000 (about Rs 4.9 crore). The winners were announced at TTC’s virtual awards ceremony held in the UK on Friday night.

The third prize winner StaTwig’s ‘VaccineLedger’ blockchain-based supply chain solution tracks every single vial of vaccine along its journey from a manufacturer to a beneficiary. It is a UNICEF Innovation Fund Portfolio startup/World Economic Forum Global Innovator. StaTwig founder and CEO Sid Chakravarthy told Telangana Today, “We will be utilising the funds to improve our product and scale the solution to assist at least 10 lower and middle-income countries (LMIC) with their Covid-19 vaccine deliveries by the end of the year.” The Trinity Challenge is investing a £5.7 million ($8 million) charitable pledged prize fund into one grand prize winner, two second prize winners, and five third prize winners. The eight winners have been selected by an international panel of expert judges, out of a total of 340 applications from 61 countries, narrowed down to 16 finalists and 15 ‘highly commended’ teams.

The competition, launched in September 2020 by England’s former chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, has seen collaborations among the private, public, charitable and academic sectors, and will drive a step-change in using data and analytics for pandemic preparedness.

Grand prize winner

TTC has recognised Thailand-based Participatory One Health Disease Detection (PODD) as the grand prize winner and awarded the company with £1.3 million ($1.8 million) in pledged funding. This project empowers farmers to identify and report zoonotic diseases that could potentially pass from animals to humans, triggering another pandemic. Having already achieved significant success in Thailand, with a network of 20,000 farmers helping to detect and control disease outbreaks, PODD is looking to expand its operations to Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Uganda and Vietnam over the next three years.

Other winners

The second prize award winners Sentinel Forecasting System for Infectious Disease Risk and Blood Counts won £1 million ($1.4 million) each in pledged funding. The five third prize winners have each been awarded £480,000 ($660,000) in pledged funding. In addition to StaTwig, MedShr Insights and Early Warning System, Khushi Health, Living Goods, and Disease Surveillance with Multi-modal Sensor Network & Data Analytics project of University of Massachusetts Lowell won the awards.

Indian project Khushi Health equips community health workers with a suite of digital solutions – including dashboards – to show where infection rates are high and helps with referral systems enabling community health workers to serve citizens at high-risk for Covid-19.

Wide-ranging benefits

In addition to financial support, TTC will provide connections to the right organisations to maximise the impact of their solutions. Since its inception nine months ago, TTC has united early applicants with partners from the private, academic and social sectors to receive access to digital platforms, data, and technical advice, to scale-up the use of data and analytics to protect the world from future health emergencies. It has helped form over 200 connections between applicants and its members.

TTC is a coalition of 42 organisations from the private, public, philanthropic and academic sectors, working towards protecting the world from future pandemics, by using data, analytics and digital tools. The coalition includes Optum, GSK, Reckitt, McKinsey, Google, Facebook, Legal & General, the LSE, University of Cambridge, Hong Kong University Med, Discovery, Fiocruz, Internews, to name a few.