43 Ways to Save the World

by LaVonne on 29/06/05 at 1:30 pm

[Ed. note: Let's pray that these researchers don't use thimerasol in their vaccines or pesticides in their efforts to fight disease-spreading insects. That would kind of defeat the purpose, know what I mean?]

Gates Funds $436 Million Worth of Radical Health Projects:

SEATTLE – The Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, a major effort to achieve scientific breakthroughs against diseases that kill millions of people each year in the world’s poorest countries, today offered 43 grants totaling $436.6 million for a broad range of innovative research projects involving scientists in 33 countries. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to create “deliverable technologies” – health tools that are not only effective, but also inexpensive to produce, easy to distribute, and simple to use in developing countries.

The initiative is supported by a $450 million commitment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as two new funding commitments: $27.1 million from the Wellcome Trust, and $4.5 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). The initiative is managed by global health experts at the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and CIHR. Additional proposed Grand Challenges projects are under review and may be awarded grants later this year.

The Grand Challenges initiative was launched by the Gates Foundation in 2003, in partnership with the National Institutes of Health, with a $200 million grant to the FNIH to help apply innovation in science and technology to the greatest health problems of the developing world. Of the billions spent each year on research into life-saving medicines, only a small fraction is focused on discovering and developing new tools to fight the diseases that cause millions of deaths each year in developing countries.

“It’s shocking how little research is directed toward the diseases of the world’s poorest countries,” said Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “By harnessing the world’s capacity for scientific innovation, I believe we can transform health in the developing world and save millions of lives.”

Each of the 43 projects seeks to tackle one of 14 major scientific challenges that, if solved, could lead to important advances in preventing, treating, and curing diseases of the developing world. The 14 Grand Challenges, which were identified from among more than 1,000 suggestions from scientists and health experts around the world, address the following goals:

Developing improved childhood vaccines that do not require refrigeration, needles, or multiple doses, in order to improve immunization rates in developing countries, where each year 27 million children do not receive basic immunizations
Studying the immune system to guide the development of new vaccines, including vaccines to prevent malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV, which together kill more than 5 million people each year
Developing new ways of preventing insects from transmitting diseases such as malaria, which infects 350-500 million people every year
Growing more nutritious staple crops to combat malnutrition, which affects more than 2 billion people worldwide
Discovering ways to prevent drug resistance because many drugs that were once successful at treating diseases like malaria are losing their effectiveness
Discovering methods to treat latent and chronic infections such as tuberculosis, which nearly a third of the world’s population harbors in their bodies
More accurately diagnosing and tracking disease in poor countries that do not have sophisticated laboratories or reliable medical recordkeeping systems

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