Gates Foundation Invests in 104 Novel Ideas for Global Health
Scientists from diverse set of disciplines and regions receive $100,000 each to explore bold, untested projects.
BANGKOK — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced 104 grants to explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve global health. The grants of US$100,000 each will be made to scientists from 22 countries and five continents. They mark the first round of funding from Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative to help lower the barriers for testing innovative ideas in global health.
The initial set of grants will inject fresh perspective into research for preventing or curing infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and TB, and limiting the emergence of drug resistance. Successful applicants showed how their project falls outside current scientific paradigms and could lead to significant advances if successful—in just two pages.
“We were hoping this program would level the playing field so anyone with a transformational idea could more quickly assess its potential for the benefit of global health,” said Dr. Tachi Yamada, president of global health at the Gates Foundation, who announced the grants at the fourth annual meeting of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative in Bangkok. “The quality of the applications exceeded all of our expectations. It was so hard for reviewers to champion just one great idea that we selected almost twice as many projects for funding as we had initially planned.”
104 grants were selected from nearly 4,000 proposals, with the geographic distribution of applicants largely matching the geographic distribution of awards. The applicant details were not provided to reviewers, helping them to focus on the innovation of the idea instead of a scientist’s credentials, geographic location, or organization’s reputation.
All levels of scientists are represented, including young investigators who never before have received a research grant, and those who were applying experience from other fields like bioengineering. Grants were made to universities and other nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and six private companies.
Projects cover a wide range of innovation, including a “mosquito flashlight” to prevent malaria transmission by disrupting wavelengths, self-destructing TB cells, and studying anti-infective properties of the eye to help prevent HIV/AIDS and other infectious disease. A few examples of funded projects follow:
Mimicking effective natural processes to limit infectious disease:
- Pattamaporn Kittayapong at Mahidol University in Thailand will explore new approaches for controlling dengue fever by studying bacteria with natural abilities to limit the disease.
- Suzanne Fleiszig at the University of California, Berkeley, in the U.S. will focus on the natural defenses of the human eye to discover new classes of broad-spectrum anti-microbial agents.
- Elizabeth Sockett at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. will study whether the best medicine against some disease-causing bacteria may be a “living antibiotic” made up of microorganisms that naturally prey on harmful ones.
Engineering ways to enhance the natural human immune system:
- Leonard Damelin at the National Health Laboratory Service in South Africa will attempt to improve bacteria that naturally line the walls of the vagina and cervix in order to enhance their ability to fight infections.
- Yen Wah Tong at the National University of Singapore will attempt to create nanoparticles to “soak up” viruses circulating in the body; the particles will be imprinted with the viruses in order to mimic the three-dimensional structure of cells that the virus normally tries to infect.
- Jord Stam at Utrecht University in the Netherlands will attempt to create “two-sided” antibodies to fight HIV; one side would attach to HIV, and the other side would safely deposit the virus in cells in which it cannot replicate.
- Sanah Jowhari at TheraCarb, a biotechnology company in Canada, will apply technology to capture and remove the cholera toxin from the body of a host, and validate an approach to developing an effective drug candidate for cholera.
Probing unexpected results for global health:
- Elijah Songok at the Kenya Medical Research Institute will explore whether natural resistance to HIV may be linked to genetic markers for type 2 diabetes.
- Huan Nguyen at the International Vaccine Institute in Korea will follow up on the unexpected finding that a fluorescent green protein originally intended as a research control could be the basis of a highly effective influenza vaccine.
Exploring hypotheses that challenge conventional wisdom:
- Mike McCune at the University of California, San Francisco, in the U.S. suggests that the best immune response to HIV may be no response at all, because the immune cells that are marshaled to fight the virus are the same cells that HIV infects.
- Hiroyuki Matsuoka at Jichi Medical University in Japan thinks it may be possible to turn mosquitoes that normally transmit disease into “flying syringes,” so that when they bite humans they deliver vaccines.
A complete list of the funded projects is available at the Grand Challenges Explorations Website.
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Related to help stopping spread disease. There are even more simpler solutions.
I read that a mosquito net (that costs a few dollars) can help prevent malaria, which wills 2,000,000 people a year.
They say that for something like a few billion dollars, we can distribute mosquito netting to all of Africa.
Hmmm…where can we get that kind of money?
I don’t know. Oh…maybe STOP FIGHTING IN IRAQ for a FEW HOURS!
Friar’s last blog post..Perfesser Friar gets Elemental.
Oh, by the way…all these other ideas here…those are GREAT, too!
Friar’s last blog post..Perfesser Friar gets Elemental.
The last figures I saw (some time ago) claimed that US operations in Iraq were costing $500,000 per minute.
Wonder why the US economy is experiencing some “difficulty”?
Maybe spend some of that money on humanitarian issues as Friar says, or perhaps research into alternative energy, or something…
Brett Legree’s last blog post..viking fridays – tears in the rain.
I wholeheartedly agree with you guys on this.
If they stopped fighting, there would be nothing to fight against. Love is a far more powerful force than war, and of course not at all destructive.
There have been a lot of sci-fi type stories where a civilization goes beyond “physical war” and everything is simulated.
We should just do that instead – the modern games are pretty realistic.
And think of it, some of us could moonlight as soldiers!
(I’m pretty handy with a rocket launcher, you know…)
Seriously though you have to take your hat off to Bill and Melinda for doing this. So many businesspeople or celebrities talk the talk, but they are walking the walk.
Brett Legree’s last blog post..viking fridays – tears in the rain.
Exactly. I love when people are truly generous with what they’ve been given. This is a lot of money we’re talking about, and it’s not just this foundation; they do much else as well.
@steph
I’m dont’ wanna get too political. Of course, love is better than war. And it’s obvious that most of the wars have just been stupid and immoral.
But sometimes, if there are insane people abusing power or attacking you, you can’t sit back and let it happen. Sometimes you have to take a stand.
WWII for example. What if we said “Let’s not fight”. Well, I don’t think Hitler would have agreed. We’d probably have ended up with the Swastika on the Peace Tower. (Not to mention what would have happened to the Jews!)
Or recently, what about the Taliban, killing God knows how many people, including women and glrls for just wanting to get an education?
Or Mugabe, starving his own people?
So what do we do? We can sit back, and try to talk and reason with these leaders (for years on end, maybe), Meanwhile we watch millions of people die.
Or we can go in fighting, start a war. That’s shitty too. But we might remove the evil and save more lives in the end.
So which is ethically the better thing to do?
There’s no easy answer! (I certainly don’t have one!). Just that I think that there are cases when using force might be the lesser of two evils.
Friar’s last blog post..Perfesser Friar gets Elemental.
@Brett
I agree with you about Bill and Melinda
Remember 15 years ago, everyone made fun of Bill Gates, because he was so damned rich?
Well, they’re not making fun of him now. At least he’s DOING something constructive with his wealth!
I wish people like him and Melinda would make the front pages (instead of bosons (there’s that word again!) like Paris Hilton, or Donald Trump.
(Well, I guess this is why we read the WooHoo Report,eh?)
Friar’s last blog post..Perfesser Friar gets Elemental.
@ Friar: Certainly, if we see wrong—or what we perceive to be wrong—we shouldn’t just ignore it, hope it will sort itself out, or go away. As you can see from a few other articles here, I (we) support action for good. The trouble is when we start acting like imperialists, as though our solutions, beliefs, practices, etc., are civilized and better and right when others’ are not. It’s this superior attitude that has actually caused a great deal of animosity and war.
I agree that Hitler could likely not have been reasoned with. It’s my belief he was a rather evil nut, though you have to admit, he had a few strengths we could learn from, such as dreaming big and rallying crowds to support him. Imagine what we could do with those schematics if our efforts were properly aimed and intended.
I’ve been angry enough about the lack of human rights and about totalitarian and authoritarian and superior behavior when it comes to how people are treated to say we ought to kill some bastards, but in retrospect, what, really, does that sort out? It may remove one man from the equation, or even several, but more power-hungry and wackos with bizarre and terrible ideas will emerge. Our thinking, our methods, have to change entirely, because it’s obvious that after years and years the same tactics are not working at all.
I have to add to that first paragraph that I would not dispute that terrorism, mutilation, starvation, etc., any actions disregarding human rights, are gravely wrong and I would not hesitate in that case to maintain my belief and try to spread it. And in this case, others like me have felt the same and have—good news!—effected positive change.
But there are instances in which we act no better, you must admit, which only creates a struggle between two forces that will never actually solve anything at all but rather only ultimately end in the assertion of power over the other after the other loses. Obviously, this creates animosity and retaliation. We need win-win situations.
The politics of war are difficult to discuss because there often seems to be more at work behind dictators. Everyone knew Hitler was up to no good, but they just talked with him – why? Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father) was a prominent businessman and the inaugural chairman of the SEC. He was involved with insider trading up until the crash of 1929, and he cashed out just in time… between 1929 and 1935 his fortune went from $14M to $180M. He was the US Ambassador to the UK from 1938 to 1940 and rejected Churchill’s warnings about Hitler, choosing instead to side with Chamberlain. Perhaps his family had something to gain from the war – many prominent families made a lot of money from WW2.
Similarly with Iraq – Saddam Hussein was essentially put into power by the US Government. Many families and corporations have made a lot of money from both selling weapons used in that war and in the rebuilding efforts after that war.
It sort of makes you think that this kind of thing is intentional. Let someone nefarious get into power and ignore them, or plain out set them up – let them cause havoc for a while – and then swoop in and “liberate” the people – and much of the resources of the liberated country…
I often wonder who the true war criminals really are.
Brett Legree’s last blog post..viking fridays – tears in the rain.
Well, at least Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a step in the right direction..!
We need more billionaires like that!
Friar’s last blog post..Perfesser Friar gets Elemental.
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