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.
”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% of spending on health research and development addresses the needs of the 90% of the world’s population which is the poorest and least healthy.
”We have encouraged for over 100 years the scientific and technical communities to create the possibilities for extending diagnosis and curing diseases,” said Rick Klausner, executive director of the global health programme of the foundation. ”Unfortunately, the scientific efforts at creating modern medicines have often ignored the diseases often only experienced by half to two-thirds of the world that live in developing countries.”
Klausner said he thought the 43 projects being funded will ”bring to bear extraordinary brilliance” on difficult and neglected problems.
If they work out, some of the bright ideas have potential for the rich world, too. One team, led by Abraham Sonenshein from Tufts University school of medicine in the US, has been awarded $5-million for research on encasing vaccines in harmless bacteria that have tempera ture resistant properties. It could mean vaccines being produced in powdered form in a bag, ready to mix with water and swallow. Most children in the US and Europe would also be grateful to avoid the needle.
There is similar universal appeal for the ideas of Lorne Babiuk from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, who gets $5,6-million to work on reducing the three whooping cough vaccines to one, which would be delivered via the mucosal lining of the nose or mouth.
One American team, led by Paul Yager from the University of Washington, will get $15,4-million to develop a test kit that futurologists have often suggested for the NHS. It will be a small card, about the size of a credit card, containing all the necessary reagents to test a blood sample for a range of diseases, such as bacterial infections, malnutrition and HIV. It would be inserted into a hand-held computer and read in about 10 minutes.
British scientists have also had novel ideas. Robin Shattock, from St George’s medical school, London, gets $19,7-million to work on a vaccine for HIV that will stimulate the immune system’s fight against the virus in the lining of the vagina. They think they can devise a time-release vaccine that will be delivered through a low-cost gel or silicone ring.
A further $10-million goes to Adrian Hill’s team at Oxford University, which will work on ways of stimulating the immune system that could be used in developing vaccines for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. Although the foundation already funds many more mainstream scientific studies into new vaccines, Gates has made it clear scientists should do more to tackle the diseases of the poor. ”It’s shocking how little research is directed towards the diseases of the world’s poorest countries,” he said.
”By harnessing the world’s capacity for scientific innovation, we can transform health in the developing world and save millions of lives.”
The Wellcome Trust, in the UK, said on Monday it would put a further $27,1-million into the pot for the Grand Challenges, with the Canadian Institutes of Health adding $4,5-million.
Further proposals from scientists with bright ideas are under consideration. – Guardian Unlimited Â