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At the 2021 Annual Summit, Concordia, MIT Solve, and Horizon Therapeutics, a biotech leader in rare diseases, will announce the finalist of The Horizon Prize, a first-of-its-kind annual global innovation challenge focused on accelerating diagnosis and care for people with rare diseases.

Concordia is proud to welcome back MIT Solve to its community as a 2021 Annual Summit Lead Programming Partner. Solve is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a mission to solve world challenges. Solve is a marketplace for social impact innovation. Through open innovation challenges, Solve finds incredible tech-based social entrepreneurs all around the world. Solve then brings together MIT’s innovation ecosystem and a community of Members to fund and support these entrepreneurs to help them drive lasting, transformational impact. 

“We’re thrilled to be continuing our collaboration with MIT Solve this year as we put the spotlight on an incredibly important issue: rare diseases,” said Concordia’s Co-Founder & CEO, Matthew Swift. “Through our collaboration with both MIT Solve and Horizon , we’ll be announcing the winner of The Horizon Prize on the Main Stage of the Annual Summit, driving a much-needed conversation on how we can advance diagnosis and treatment for those faced with rare disease.” 

This year, The Horizon Prize challenged more than 138,000 visionaries, academics and inventors from 137 countries to answer, “How can technology help people with rare diseases get the right care faster and more accurately?” Narrowed down from more than 50 applications, five finalists have been identified and are being invited to pitch their solutions live to a panel of judges. Their pioneering solutions include:

  • Genomic data-driven hackathons for patients with rare diseases to solve diagnostic mysteries and find novel treatment options
  • Unified national patient data hub to synthesize information and accelerate clinical management and drug development for neuromuscular disease
  • AI to improve health outcomes for patients with rare diseases across Africa by optimizing decisions for lower-level care providers
  • Effective personalized rare disease therapies in an equitable manner to underrepresented communities
  • Genetic counselor algorithms against medical records to shorten the rare, genetic disease odyssey

The winner will be announced on the Main Stage of the 2021 Annual Summit on September 20.