NEW YORK — Freelancer, a Sydney-based firm that operates a web-based freelancer and crowdsourcing marketplace, said on Thursday that it has won a task order from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to oversee two funding competitions around genome editing.
According to Freelancer, the task order was issued under the NASA Open Innovation Services 2, or NOIS2, initiative and calls for two, three-phased research project contests as part of the National Institutes of Health's Somatic Cell Genome Editing program. The first centers on the development of an efficient non-viral system for the delivery of genome editing machinery across the blood-brain barrier and the other on a programmable system for delivering genome editing machinery to target tissues or cell types.
The contests will be administered under the America Competes Act and hosted on freelancer.com, with a $6 million total prize amount. Freelancer said that it expects to receive $700,000 for its services under the task order.