Grand Challenges applications open again

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has opened up the latest funding round for Grand Challenges Explorations — a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve global health and development problems.

Initial grants will be US$100,000 each, and projects showing promise will have the opportunity to receive additional funding of up to US$1 million. Proposals are being accepted online until 11 November for the below challenges.

‘Novel Approaches to Characterizing and Tracking the Global Burden of Antimicrobial Resistance’ is looking for ideas and approaches that generate evidence about the burden and impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and improve its translation into practice. Specifically, the challenge seeks proposals that support the following:

• Accelerating the generation of robust evidence to characterise and track the epidemiologic and economic burden of AMR.
• Understanding and describing the epidemiology of resistance and transmission of AMR.
• Evaluating and prioritising the impact of existing and novel interventions on resistance patterns.

‘Explore New Solutions in Global Health Priority Areas’ is meanwhile seeking innovative ideas to assess the burden of disease, to develop better vaccines and to develop new diagnostics, specifically in order to:

• better understand cause of death from tissue samples;
• develop a quantitative measurement of Mtb bacterial load;
• develop immunisation strategies that increase somatic hypermutation;
• explore and develop approaches to immunisation that drive donor unrestricted cytotoxic T cell responses;
• develop parenteral vaccines that induce mucosal immunity;
• develop point-of-care nucleic acid diagnostics to below $2 per test;
• enable self-testing for cervical cancer;
• develop malaria diagnostics to accelerate towards eradication.

‘Addressing Newborn and Infant Gut Health Through Bacteriophage-Mediated Microbiome Engineering’ will look to support all stages of development of bacteriophage-based tools to study the effects the gut microbiome has on the development of environmental enteric dysfunction in children in low-income settings. Topics of particular interest include:

• The pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of phage therapies — how complete is pathogen elimination and over what timescale?
• The combination of empirical ‘subtractive’ experiments in model systems, omics and computational modelling to help understand the implications of acute microbial community disruption, the presence of new and high-titer bacteriophage, the release of endotoxins, etc.

In addition, the foundation has launched a new Grand Challenge called ‘New Interventions for Global Health: Vaccine Manufacturing’. This challenge focuses on innovations in vaccine manufacturing platforms designed to lower production cost for vaccines that target diseases of great global burden and that are among the most costly to produce with current technologies. Letters of intent will be accepted until 5 November.

For more information on the Grand Challenges, visit http://grandchallenges.org/grant-opportunities.html.