Gates Foundation Logo In October 2006, we reported about Bill Gates’ Foundation which pledged $23 million to fight HIV/AIDS in India. Now, The Bill and Melina Gates Foundation said it will begin accepting grant proposals for another initiative called ‘Grand Challenges Exploration’ which will help scientists around the world in solving major health problems.

The Bill and Melina Gates Foundation is based in Seattle and focuses on improving the health of people all around the world.

Basically, the Grand Challenges Explorations is an expansion of Grand Challenges in the Global Health Initiative, which was launched way back in 2003 to encourage the discovery of new technologies to improve global health.

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.

    The Gates Foundation Global Health Programme President Tachi Yamada said in a statement, “Break through ideas can come from anywhere and we hope this new process will encourage a broad range of scientists from the world to bring their ideas to the table.”

    “The projects showing success will have the opportunity to receive more than one million dollar additional grant,” he added.

    The foundation will start accepting proposals for the first round of funding from March 31st 2008 onwards.