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Gates Foundation invites grant proposals for ‘bold, unconventional ideas to fight infectious diseases’

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a new US$100 million initiative — the Grand Challenges Explorations.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced that beginning 31st March, 2008, it will accept grant proposals for the first funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations, a new $100 million initiative which the Foundation says is intended ‘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 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 30th May, 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 behaviour-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.