The Hindu : International : $450-million grant to tackle health problems

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jun 29, 2005

International

International

$450-million grant to tackle health problems

Sarah Boseley

Gates Foundation to fund novel projects to improve health

LONDON: Some of the world's most inventive scientists were on Monday awarded grants totalling $450 million to turn their outside-the-box ideas into practical solutions to the 14 greatest problems besetting human health today.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose multibillionaire entrepreneur founder knows something about invention, on Monday revealed the winners of the Grand Challenges in global health, which it launched in 2003 to identify the major obstacles to improving health and find ways to overcome them.

Among the 43 projects to receive funding are several aiming to produce vaccines that do not require refrigeration. There is also a plan to genetically engineer mosquitoes that die before they are mature enough to pass on dengue fever.

There are ideas for vaccinating children without using needles, which can cause infections if they are not sterile, and schemes for growing crops full of vitamins often absent from the diets of the poorest children.

The enthusiasm for the ultimate contest in blue-sky thinking was enormous, said the Gates Foundation.

New ways

``We were amazed by the response,'' said Harold Varmus, chair of the international scientific board that guides the Grand Challenges. ``Clearly, there's tremendous untapped potential among the world's scientists to address diseases of the developing world.''

The 14 challenges were chosen from more than 1,000 suggestions from scientists and health experts around the world. They included: improving vaccines so that needles, refrigeration and multiple doses would not be required; developing new ways to stop insects transmitting diseases such as malaria; finding ways to treat latent infection such as tuberculosis which has not yet manifested itself in symptoms; and finding ways to fight the resistance that bacteria develop to drugs.

Although science constantly expands its knowledge of disease and medicine, such triumphs tend to help the rich world. Global health experts talk of the ``10:90 gap'', in which 10 per cent of spending on health research and development addresses the needs of the 90 per cent of the world's population which is the poorest and least healthy. —

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