The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced the opening of Round 6 of Grand Challenges Explorations, a US$100-million (Bt3.2 billion) grant initiative to encourage bold and unconventional global health solutions. Proposals are being accepted until November 2, 2010.
Grand Challenges Explorations offers researchers the chance to win $100,000 (Bt3.2 million) grants to foster innovative proj-ects that could transform health in developing countries.
The initiative focuses on areas where creative, unorthodox think-ing is urgently needed.
For this round, applicants are asked to focus their proposals on these five areas:
- Design new approaches to cure HIV infection;
- Create the next generation of sanitation technologies;
- Create low-cost cellphone-based applications for priority global health conditions;
- Create new technologies for the health of mothers and new-born babies;
- The poliovirus endgame: cre-ate ways to accelerate, sustain and monitor eradication.
The topic focusing on sanita-tion technologies highlights the integrated approach the founda-tion is taking toward health in developing countries. Improved sanitation is essential to reducing water-borne illnesses and has profound economic, educational, and social benefits.
"Water, sanitation, and hygiene are critical to reducing the bur-den of water-borne diseases like polio and rotavirus," said Dr Tachi Yamada, president of the Global Health Program at the Gates Foundation.
"We hope the Grand Challenges Explorations program will unearth new, sustainable approaches to sanitation that could save the lives of thousands of children who die from diar-rheal diseases each year."
Proposals will be accepted online via the website www.grandchallenges.org/explo-rations. The initiative uses a streamlined, grant-making process. Applications are two pages, and preliminary data about the proposed research is not required. All are encouraged to apply.
The foundation and an inde-pendent group of reviewers will select the most innovative pro-posals, and grants will be award-ed within approximately four months from the proposal sub-mission deadline. Initial grants will be $100,000 each. Projects showing success will have the opportunity to receive additional funding up to $1 million.
The grants from Round 5 will be announced in October.