Gates grants aim to boost global health
WASHINGTON -- Projects to develop needle-free vaccines for children, render mosquitoes incapable of transmitting disease, and make cassava more nutritious made the cut for $435 million worth of new grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Grand Challenges in Global Health awards announced yesterday also include a project to develop a cheap hand-held device that could diagnose many illnesses and a plan to fight disease using stem cells as a lifetime vaccine.
''By harnessing the world's capacity for scientific innovation, I believe we can transform health in the developing world and save millions of lives," said
In 2003, Gates issued a call for proposals, hoping to attract ideas that could not get funding from sources such as governments and pharmaceutical companies.
Gates, who has pledged $5.6 billion for global health since 1995, bankrolled most of the $436 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.
Among those getting grants:
Dr. Abraham Sonenshein of the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and colleagues will try to encase vaccines in bacterial spores so they can be stored at room temperature and dissolved in water as a powder.
Dr. Scott O'Neill of the University of Queensland in Australia and his team will work to genetically modify a bacterial parasite that kills mosquitoes before they are old enough to transmit dengue virus, which infects 100 million people each year and may cause fatal fever and hemorrhaging.
Dr. David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology, and colleagues will try to genetically engineer stem cells, the body's master cells, so they can be given at birth as a lifetime vaccine against diseases.
