Proposals for Grand Challenges Explorations on Global Health

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is accepting grant proposals for its Grand Challenges Explorations online until May 30, 2008. The $100 million initiative involves awarding initial grants of $100,000 each, but potentially up to $1 million.

One of the primary objectives of Grand Challenges Explorations is to involve scientists around the world who don’t typically work in global health—this includes innovators in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the developing world; those from complementary disciplines and in the private sector; and young investigators.

The first four topic areas for which proposals will be accepted through the Grand Challenges Explorations initiative are:

• Creating new ways to protect against infectious diseases, including alternatives to traditional vaccination.
• Creating new drugs and delivery systems to limit the emergence of resistance from developing in the disease-causing agent.
• Creating new ways to prevent or cure HIV infection that fall outside current research on vaccines, antiretroviral drugs, and other biomedical and behavior-change strategies.
• Exploring the basis for latency in TB, with the goal of discovering new ways to identify and eliminate latent infection, and break the cycle of TB transmission.