North Carolina companies and institutions are eligible to submit proposals in a $100 million grant initiative that will fund bold and unconventional global health solutions.
Grand Challenges Explorations, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will award initial grants of up to $100,000 each. Projects showing success will have the opportunity to receive additional funding of $1 million or more.
Each round of the Grand Challenges Explorations initiative will award grants against a set of specific topics. Round 1 topics are:
- Creating new ways to protect against infectious diseases, including alternatives to traditional vaccination.
- Creating new drugs and delivery systems to limit the emergence of resistance from developing in the disease-causing agent.
- Creating new ways to prevent or cure HIV infection that fall outside current research on vaccines, antiretroviral drugs, and other biomedical and behavior-change strategies.
- Exploring the basis for latency in TB, with the goal of discovering new ways to identify and eliminate latent infection, and break the cycle of TB transmission.
The grant process is a fast- track approach. Applications are two pages, and no preliminary data is required. Applicants must register their intent to submit a proposal by May 15, 2008. Proposals will be accepted online through May 30, 2008.
The foundation and an independent group of reviewers will select the most innovative proposals, and grants will be awarded within approximately three months from the proposal submission deadline.
Full descriptions of the initial topic areas and application instructions are available at www.gcgh.org/explorations.