Three new Grand Challenges announced

One decade after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Grand Challenges in Global Health grant program - a research initiative to catalyse scientific and technological innovation to achieve major breakthroughs in global health - a group of international partners has funded three new challenges aimed at creating breakthroughs in science.

Through investments in high-risk, high-reward research, the next phase of Grand Challenges seeks bold solutions and strategies to address some of the most pressing global health and development issues of our time. The three new initiatives are:

• All children thriving - Focuses on developing new tools and holistic approaches to help mothers and children thrive in the developing world by ensuring a healthy birth for both mother and child and setting children on a path to healthy physical growth and cognitive development.
• Putting women and girls at the centre of development - Focuses on a rigorous understanding of women’s and girls’ needs and preferences and gender inequalities and supporting new approaches to promote women’s and girls’ empowerment that will enhance the ability to achieve multiple health and development goals.
• Creating new interventions for global health - Focuses on accelerating the translation of original and innovative concepts for vaccines, drugs and diagnostics into safe, effective, affordable and widely used interventions for diseases in the developing world.

“We know how critical women and girls are to the health and economic prosperity of their families and communities, but we don’t have all the answers yet,” said foundation co-chair Melinda Gates. “Over the last decade, Grand Challenges has demonstrated that when we partner together and think in bold ways about possible solutions, we get that much closer to every person realising their full potential. I am excited by the incredible opportunities that lie ahead with these new challenges.”

“Melinda and I have always believed that advances in science can help reduce inequity in a big way,” added co-chair Bill Gates. “But you have to be willing to take some risks and see some projects fail. That’s the idea behind Grand Challenges - to focus bright scientists on the problems of the poorest, take some risks and deliver results.”

Ongoing research under the original Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative includes promising projects that are speeding the development of new vaccines and strategies to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria; new approaches to vector control; and a new class of point-of-care diagnostics.

Applications for grants under the new challenges will be accepted from 4 November 2014. For more information, visit http://grandchallenges.org/grant-opportunities.html.

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