Now live: Innocentive Marketplace. Get shortlisted for funded opportunities today.

Alternatives to Antibiotics: Prevention or Treatment of Food-producing Animals

45 Submissions
$20,000 USD
Challenge closed

Challenge overview

Antibiotics are the treatment of choice for bacterial infections in food-producing animals. However, they are not always found to be efficacious and their risks to public health call for alternatives that can replace them. 

The Seeker wishes to identify novel alternative approaches to replace the use of currently used antibiotics in the prevention and treatment of bacterial infections. 

This is an Ideation Challenge with a guaranteed award for at least one submitted solution.

 

Mastitis is an inflammatory disease that affects livestock, resulting from bacterial infection of the mammary gland. It is a disease with high economic impact to farmers (ca. 20% of animals per year can be affected) and that poses a risk to human health. 

Currently, the mainstay of treatment for this infection is the use of a wide array of antibiotics. The use of currently available antibiotics has proven not to be completely efficient. Additionally, there is an increasing public health concern with the use of antibiotics and its consequences in increased antibiotic resistance. 

Therefore, the Seeker wants to identify alternative approaches for treatment or prevention of mastitis as well as other relevant bacterial infections of livestock. 

This is an Ideation Challenge, which has the following unique features:

  • There is a guaranteed award.  The awards will be paid to the best submission(s) as solely determined by the Seeker. The total payout will be $20,000, with at least one award being no smaller than $10,000 and no award being smaller than $2,500. 
  • The Solvers are not required to transfer exclusive intellectual property rights to the Seeker.  Rather, by submitting a proposal, the Solver grants to the Seeker a royalty-free, perpetual, and non-exclusive license to use any information included in this proposal, including for promotional purposes.

Submissions to this Challenge must be received by 11:59 PM (US Eastern Time) on January 22, 2017. Late submissions will not be considered.

After the Challenge deadline, the Seeker will complete the review process and make a decision with regards to the Winning Solution(s). All Solvers that submit a proposal will be notified on the status of their submissions; however, no detailed evaluation of individual submissions will be provided.

Use the slider to explore how the Challenge process works:

Register

Review & Accept

Submit

Win

To start solving this Challenge, log in to the Challenge Center or register as a Solver