Announced in November 2025, the Genesis Mission is an ambitious and coordinated effort to broadly encourage the use of massive federal datasets to catalyze AI-driven scientific research. Among the numerous initiatives outlined in the order, prize competitions are mentioned as a mechanism to incentivize and guide private-sector participation.1 The FY26 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) also references prize competitions as a vehicle for innovation to advance specific science and technology goals.2 Both of these policies reflect recommendations from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) to leverage grand research challenges to further biotechnology priorities.
Prize competitions are a proven incentive structure and have already demonstrated success for the scientific community. In this blog, we discuss useful prize competitions, identify historical examples of federal competitions for scientific data and AI, and explore how they could inform future implementation of both Genesis Mission and NDAA goals.
What Are Federal Prize Competitions?
Federal prize competitions are contests or challenges sponsored by government agencies that leverage monetary and nonmonetary incentives to either (a) advance knowledge or benchmarks within a specific field or (b) solicit solutions for specific problems.3 While not meant to replace traditional research and development (R&D) funding schemes, prize competitions have unique benefits that can be used as policy mechanisms for driving innovation.
First, competitions shift the risk of failure to participants. Not only does this allow the sponsoring agency to establish ambitious goals but also the agency may only pay out for success as defined by the challenge parameters. This “pay-for-success” model means that even if participants fail to meet the full criteria for success, their work still furthers the field and establishes a new benchmark for future efforts. Second, competitions allow sponsoring agencies and departments to test ideas, solutions, or prototypes for operational effectiveness prior to any major procurement decisions. Third, competitions are generally open to the public and have relatively low barriers to entry, attracting a broad pool of participants from a wide range of sectors.
Using Competitions to Further Scientific Innovation
Our assessment of Challenges.gov, the official website for U.S. government-sponsored prize competitions, identifies a total of 607 prize competitions sponsored by the federal government from 2020 to 2025. Of these, 178 focused on health, life science, or biomedical research and development. This is unsurprising, given that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) historically ranks among the top federal departments and agencies that sponsor prize challenges, alongside the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Energy (DoE).
Of the 178 health- and science-related prize competitions, we further identified 44 that are particularly relevant to the goals of the Genesis Mission and the FY26 NDAA because they aim to achieve one or more of the following elements:
- Develop AI algorithms for health, life sciences, or biomedical research
- Derive scientific insights from federal scientific data sources
- Enhance or integrate scientific data
This dataset, shown in Table 1, offered a collective monetary prize purse of $24.6 million. The majority of these specific competitions are sponsored by an entity within HHS.
Table 1. Federal Prize Competitions from 2020 to 2025: AI and Data for Health and Biotechnology
| Department or Agency | Number of Challenges | Total Monetary Awards Offered |
| National Institutes of Health (HHS) | 20 | $14,135,000 |
| Food and Drug Administration (HHS) | 6 | No Monetary Prize Awarded |
| Office of the Secretary (HHS) | 4 | $300,000 |
| Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DOD) | 2 | $7,500,000 |
| National Institute of Standards and Technology (Commerce) | 2 | $1,076,000 |
| Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (HHS) | 2 | $600,000 |
| Veterans Health Administration (Department of Veterans Affairs) | 2 | $100,000 |
| U.S. Census Bureau (Commerce) | 1 | $310,000 |
| Environmental Protection Agency | 1 | $300,000 |
| Federal Acquisition Service (GSA) | 1 | $100,000 |
| ARPA-H (HHS) | 1 | $83,000 |
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (HHS) | 1 | $70,000 |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | 1 | $30,000 |
| Total | 44 | $24,604,000 |
Below, we discuss two categories of competitions from our dataset: (1) Challenges to Advance AI for Health and Life Sciences Research and (2) Challenges to Enhance or Integrate Federal Scientific Data Sources, and highlight how previous challenges may serve as precedent for future challenges proposed under the Genesis Mission and FY26 NDAA.
Challenges to Advance AI for Health and Life Sciences Research
AI has the potential to unlock scientific breakthroughs, helping researchers to identify trends in complex biological data, predict disease states and outcomes, and streamline time-consuming data processing tasks. Many challenges in our dataset asked participants to address defined scientific questions by designing, developing, improving, or testing AI systems. Competitions in this category advanced a wide variety of AI-driven scientific goals, from uncovering causes of heart failure to creating pipelines to identify anomalies in cancer genetic sequences.
Unlocking AI-Driven Insights from Federal Data
Closely mirroring the Genesis Mission, a number of competitions specifically focused on using federal data from a variety of sources to develop scientific AI. In some cases, these challenges were framed as a way to achieve both the primary aim of advancing scientific discovery and the add-on benefit of familiarizing researchers with federal datasets to encourage follow-on innovation. A few select examples of prize competitions in this category are shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Select Challenge Examples: Develop Health and Life Sciences AI Using Federal Data
| Year | Name | Sponsoring Agency | Total Award | Description |
| 2025 | PREPARE Challenge | National Institutes of Health (HHS) | $650,000 | Identify, curate, and prepare data from federal or other sources, and then develop algorithms for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. |
| 2022 | Pediatric Cardiac Genomics Consortium and Cardiovascular Development Challenge Prize | National Institutes of Health (HHS) | $525,000 | Use datasets of NHLBI-funded and/or generated genomic and phenotypic data to identify research insights for pediatric congenital heart disease. |
| 2020 | precisionFDA Truth Challenge V2 – Calling Variants from Short and Long Reads in Difficult-to-Map Regions | Food and Drug Administration (HHS) | No monetary prize | Develop innovative variant-calling methods for challenging genomic regions, and demonstrate performance on datasets provided by precisionFDA. |
Within this subset of competitions, the PREPARE Challenge is notable in that it draws on multiple Genesis Mission-relevant themes. In the first of three challenge phases, participants were asked to identify, curate, and/or build datasets from federal or other sources to use in subsequent phases of algorithm development. As a result, the challenge yielded insights regarding data integration and preparation, as well as the development of relevant AI systems.
Challenges to Enhance or Integrate Federal Scientific Data Sources
Some challenges in our dataset aim to enhance data resources for AI systems, using a variety of approaches to improve data quality and AI-readiness. Given the Genesis Mission’s central objective to create an integrated platform for federal scientific data, these prize competitions could be especially informative. Select examples of prize competitions to enhance scientific data resources are shown in Table 3.
Table 3. Select Challenge Examples: Enhance Federal Scientific Data Sources
| Year | Name | Sponsoring Agency | Total Award | Description |
| 2025 | National Institutes of Health (NIH) Data Sharing Index (S-index) Challenge | National Institutes of Health (HHS) | $1,000,000 | Propose a method to create an “S-index” to evaluate researchers’ contributions to shared data resources, creating a way for funders, reviewers, and tenure committees to recognize and acknowledge researchers who generate high-quality datasets. |
| 2024 | NIDDK Central Repository Data-Centric Challenge | National Institutes of Health (HHS) | No monetary prize | Harmonize and aggregate disparate data contained within indicated NIDDK datasets and studies to create a unified AI-ready dataset. |
| 2024 | AI Data Readiness Challenge for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) | National Institutes of Health (HHS) | $50,000 | Identify limitations and recommend best practices that would make data in the NCI’s Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) more usable for downstream AI applications. |
| 2021 | Synthetic Health Data Challenge | Office of the Secretary (HHS) | $100,000 | Develop enhancements and use cases for Synthea, an open source tool that generates synthetic health records to advance clinical research while protecting patients’ privacy and lowering access barriers. |
Data-centric prize competitions encompassed a range of goals and outputs, from cleaning and structuring disparate data into a uniform format, to asking researchers for feedback regarding the AI-readiness of federal data, to enhancing the capabilities of an open source data-generation tool. One competition even addresses the underlying lack of incentives for researchers by developing a metric to recognize data contributions as a research output.
Considerations
We observed a number of shared themes across our dataset that demonstrate the benefits and relevance of prize competitions. The following observations could inform future efforts to leverage grand challenges for AI-driven scientific research:
- Monetary and nonmonetary awards work: Competitions in our dataset offer prizes in various forms. While attractive, large monetary awards are not always required to attract quality participants, including from major industry players. Nonmonetary incentives, including public recognition, manuscript authorship, presentation opportunities at conferences or agency-level meetings, continued engagement with development teams at the sponsoring agency, access to federal research infrastructure, and potential follow-on opportunities, all incentivize participation.
- Win-win scenarios: Prize competitions benefit all parties involved. The 2020 NCATS ASPIRE Reduction-to-Practice Challenge, which sought to accelerate all-in-one platforms for discovering new nonaddictive therapies for pain, addiction, and overdose, illustrates this dynamic. One participant explained how the competition unlocked a new, lasting research portfolio: their group had never considered applying their technical platform to opioid-related problems before the challenge, but their success led to the establishment of a full research program in the area. For the sponsor, the challenge functioned as both an incubator and testbed for next-generation translational science platforms, with members of both winning teams going on to sign a NIH Research Collaborative Agreement to continue freely sharing ongoing work.
- Building blocks for big-picture goals: Prize competitions are highly customizable to the sponsor’s needs, generating deliverables ranging from academic-style research findings, to new or expanded datasets, to prototype AI systems, to “lessons learned” for the sponsor. Challenges can support sponsors’ longer-term portfolios, as in the case of one that gathered feedback, recommendations, and best practices to make a federal data platform more AI-ready, or another that used insights from a prize competition to inform the strategic planning process of a new NIH program. Challenges can build toward these overarching research objectives consecutively through multiphase competitions, in which the most promising ideas or solutions from an initial proof-of-concept phase advance to subsequent competitions, or by tackling different elements of a shared problem.
- Partnerships and private-sector participation: Prize competitions can bring together invested parties to foster new relationships and engagement across the science and technology landscape. Most of the competitions we reviewed included participants from industry, as well as academic researchers, medical technology developers, and software service providers. Sponsors also formed partnerships, cooperating with other government agencies, nonprofit organizations, international governments, and the private sector to collaboratively host competitions.
Final Thoughts
As the Genesis Mission begins to take shape, ensuring that federal prize competitions can further its goals will require careful consideration from challenge planners.
First, prize challenges facilitated by the Genesis Mission should make sure to collect participant feedback and include it as one of its reported outcomes. Challenges can report multiple kinds of outcomes, such as overall results, winning teams, and agency takeaways. But challenges that make a point to collect and share winner feedback, either for the challenge itself or for the scientific research question underlying the challenge, gain additional benefits through information to guide future efforts.
Second, these competitions must be reported both to the Challenge.gov database and denoted as a Genesis initiative. Not only will doing so ensure robust future analysis of competitions but this action also aligns with language in the Genesis Mission Executive Order that requires an annual report be submitted to the president regarding the status of the mission.
While competitions are not meant to detract from traditional R&D mechanisms, they are useful tools that agencies can and should employ. Failure is rare, and only serves to further progress and establish critical benchmarks in the field. Perhaps most importantly, prize competitions convene all parts of the innovation ecosystem to work in concert to achieve scientific breakthroughs aligned with mission priorities.
- Genesis Mission (Sec. 5., iv) “launch coordinated funding opportunities or prize competitions across participating agencies, to the extent permitted by law and subject to available appropriations, to incentivize private-sector participation in AI-driven scientific research aligned with Mission objectives.”
- FY26 NDAA (Sec. 246.,b, 5) “The benefits and costs of issuing a research grand challenge, or a series of challenges, that focus on making biotechnology predictably engineerable and how the Department would implement such research grand challenge or series of challenges.”
- The terms “challenge,” “competition,” and “contest” are used interchangeably throughout.
- To identify challenges for inclusion, we examined all 607 federal prize competitions from 2020 to 2025 and flagged challenges related to health, life sciences, or biomedical research. From these, we selected challenges that fulfilled any of the following criteria relevant to the Genesis Mission or Section 246 of the 2026 NDAA: (a) explicitly involved using federal data sources to derive scientific insights, (b) explicitly mentioned the development of algorithms or models, or (c) explicitly involved enhancing or integrating federal scientific data sources.