Gates Foundation delivers global health grants
WASHINGTON -- The Gates Foundation yesterday announced plans to award $437 million to 43 researchers battling global health issues, including two Harvard University professors and one from the Tufts University School of Medicine.
The Grand Challenges in Global Health awards also include a project to develop a cheap hand-held device that could diagnose a range of illnesses, a plan to fight disease using stem cells as a lifetime vaccine, and a project to render mosquitoes incapable of transmitting disease.
''It's shocking how little research is directed toward the diseases of the world's poorest countries," said
In 2003, Gates issued a call for proposals for his program, hoping to attract some ideas that could not get funding from the more traditional sources such as governments and pharmaceutical companies.
''We were amazed . . . we received more than 1,000 ideas from scientists in 33 countries," former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Harold Varmus, who chaired the scientific board that guided the initiative, told reporters in a telephone briefing. The board whittled the proposals down to 43 they thought had the best chance of both succeeding and of making a big difference to health in poor countries.
The Gates foundation, which has pledged $5.6 billion for global health since 1995, bankrolled most of the $437 million in grants, with another $27.1 million from Britain's nonprofit Wellcome Trust, and $4.5 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
''I think we will see enormous impact with the real potential to make breakthroughs," said Dr. Elias Zerhouni, another board member, who is also director of the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray of the Harvard School of Public Health will receive $18.8 million to develop new methods for assessing the health status of people in the developing world, to compensate for incomplete health data in many countries.
Richard A. Flavell of Yale University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will receive $17 million to improve the safety of vaccine research by genetically engineering laboratory mice to be more similar to humans.
David A. Edwards, a Harvard engineer, was awarded $7.6 million to develop tuberculosis and diphtheria vaccines that can be delivered through a spray rather than a needle.
Abraham Lincoln ''Linc" Sonenshein of the Tufts University School of Medicine will receive $5 million to further his development of childhood vaccines that do not need refrigeration to remain effective and are therefore more practical for use in areas of the world that lack extensive refrigeration. His lab plans to encase vaccines in harmless bacteria that have natural temperature-regulating abilities.
Elsewhere, David Baltimore of the California Institute of Technology, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received nearly $14 million to try to genetically engineer stem cells, the body's master cells, so they can be given at birth as a lifetime vaccine against diseases.
