The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest US $35 million in grants to expand the pipeline of groundbreaking ideas that can help women and children live more prosperous and healthy lives. http://www.grandchallenges.org/about/Newsroom/Pages/Nov2011_release.aspx.
The funding will support two new Grand Challenges in Global Health grant programs:
* Preventing Preterm Birth, managed in partnership with the Global Alliance for the Prevention of Prematurity and Stillbirth (GAPPS), an initiative of Seattle Children's, will invest US $20 million in the discovery and development of interventions to prevent preterm birth and stillbirth by limiting infection and improving nutrition. http://www.gapps.org/healthybirth
* Discover New Ways to Achieve Healthy Growth will invest US $15 million in research to discover the causes of growth
faltering during the first 1,000 days of life and to identify effective and affordable interventions to promote healthy
growth. http://www.grandchallenges.org/GrantOpportunities/Pages/healthygrowth.aspx.
In addition, the Gates Foundation announced $9 million in funding for a new related initiative, "Biomarkers of Gut
Function and Health," that seeks to develop non-invasive measures of intestinal functioning as a way to assess infant
health and development. http://www.grandchallenges.org/biomarkers/Pages/Gut_Function_Biomarkers.aspx
Several new grant awards through the broader Grand Challenges family of programs were also announced:
* 110 grants of US $100,000 each will support innovative proposals to improve nutrition and development in young children,
as well as address infectious diseases such as polio and HIV.
* 9 GCE projects that have shown promise in tackling global health challenges such as malaria and tuberculosis will receive
additional funding of up to US $1 million each to enable researchers to continue to advance their ideas toward impact.
To learn more about GCE, please visit http://www.grandchallenges.org/Explorations/Pages/Introduction.aspx
Grant proposals for GCE Round 8 are currently being accepted until November 17, 2011 on the following topics:
Application instructions can be found at http://www.grandchallenges.org/Explorations/Pages/ApplicationInstructions.aspx
* Protect Crop Plants from Biotic Stresses From Field to Market
* Design New Approaches to Optimize Immunization Systems
* Explore New Solutions for Global Health Priority Areas
* Explore Nutrition for Healthy Growth of Infants and Children
* Apply Synthetic Biology to Global Health Challenges