Proposals sought for innovative global health research
March 2008
First round of Grand Challenges Explorations to support bold, unconventional ideas to fight infectious diseases
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, March 2008
Grant from March 31 through May 30, 2008; applicants must register intent to submit a proposal by May 15, 2008.
“….SEATTLE -- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today that beginning March 31, 2008, it will accept grant proposals for the first funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations, a new $100 million initiative to help scientists across the globe pursue ideas that have never before been tested for solving major health problems.
Initial grants through the Explorations initiative will be $100,000 each, and projects showing success will have the opportunity to receive additional funding of $1 million or more. The initiative will use an agile, accelerated grant-making process—applications will be two pages, and preliminary data are not required.
The foundation will select and award grants within approximately three months from the proposal submission deadline of May 30, 2008.
Topics for first funding round
The first funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations will consider proposals in four topic areas:
- Creating new ways to protect against infectious diseases: Untried or unproven approaches to protect against infectious diseases, including harnessing natural or synthetic immune responses, or eliminating the need for an effective immune response.
- Creating drugs or delivery systems that limit the emergence of resistance: Innovative ideas for discovering or delivering drugs that are less likely to lose effectiveness because of resistance developing in the disease-causing agent.
- Creating new ways to prevent or cure HIV infection: Innovative ideas for HIV prevention or treatment methods that fall outside current research on vaccines, antiretroviral drugs, and other biomedical and behavior-change strategies.
- Exploring the basis for latency in TB: Unconventional approaches to understanding latent TB infection, with the goal of discovering new ways to identify and eliminate latent infection, and break the cycle of TB transmission.