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BRITISH scientists working on five ground-breaking projects to fight disease will be named today as recipients of the largest individual research grants in history, awarded by Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire.
Mr Gates, the world’s richest man and greatest philanthropist, is donating $436 million (£240 million) to 43 laboratory projects vital to the world’s greatest health challenges. A grant of £11 million will go to Imperial College London, for research on tuberculosis therapies. Another London project, to try to develop an Aids vaccine, gets £10.7 million.
The Gates charitable organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will confirm today which researchers are to receive funding as part of his masterplan to tackle disease — the “Grand Challenges in Global Health”.
The 14 targets, drawn up with the advice of more than 1,000 scientists, focus on areas of research designed to prevent, treat or cure developing world diseases.
The challenges, and the cheques, that have landed at the door of some of Britain’s most innovative scientists are evidence of the scope of Bill Gates’s ambition and energy he has injected into the scientific community.
For the likes of Doug Young and Robin Shattock, recipients of two of the biggest windfalls, the money will transform their approach to research, allowing them to pursue scientific goals with a determination never previously possible.
At laboratories at Imperial College, in southwest London, Professor Young hopes to use the £11 million to pick apart the lethal structure of tuberculosis, collaborating with colleagues in the US, Singapore, Korea and Mexico. For him and Dr Shattock, who aims to develop an HIV vaginal vaccine through his £10.7 million grant, the “Grand Challenges” will help to build networks of laboratories with similar goals, and to enhance their research.
Professor Adrian Hill, at the Centre for Clinical Vaccinology and Tropical Medicine, University of Oxford, was granted £5.4 million to explore ways to improve technologies to help design vaccines for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. Professor Dominic Kwiatkowski, the research professor at the Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, has been granted £9 million to build on the work of malaria research groups around the world through the formation of the Malaria Genomic Epidemiology Network.
Austin Burt, Reader in evolutionary genetics, Imperial College London, was awarded £4.8 million to introduce artificially engineered genes that spread rapidly from parent to offspring in mosquito populations, creating sterility and the inability to transmit disease.
Innovative projects being rewarded include attempts to genetically modify bananas, rice, cassava (a tropical root), and sorghum (a tropical grass) to make more nutrients available to some of the world’s poorest communities. Malnutrition contributes to more than half the 11 million deaths each year in children under the age of 5.
Other scientists are working on creating vaccines that do not require freezing or needles. One research team is to receive £2.7 million to explore how vaccines may be encased in harmless bacteria that can regulate temperature, while others are trying to create sprays, patches and powders that would remove the need for needle injections. One of the most novel concepts is the creation of stem cells that contain the immunological components to protect against all major infectious diseases.
“It is shocking how little research is directed towards the diseases of the world’s poorest countries,” Mr Gates said. “By harnessing the world’s capacity for scientific innovation, I believe we can transform health in the developing world and transform millions of lives.”
He was inspired to set up his ambitious plan by the success of David Hilbert, a German, who in 1900 challenged fellow mathematicians to solve 23 problems in the following century. That challenge led to mathematical breakthroughs and contributed to the development of computers.
In the past year Mr Gates’s scientific experts, led by Dr Richard Klausner, have assessed more than 1,500 proposals, choosing 43 of the most innovative and potentially world-changing projects. A former director of the US National Cancer Institute, Dr Klausner said the idea was to create scientific momentum.
THE GOALS AND THE CHALLENGES
The goal Improve childhood vaccines
Challenges 1-3: to create single-dose vaccines (that can be used soon after birth), vaccines that do not require refrigeration and “needle-free” vaccines to improve immunisation in developing countries, where each year 27 million children go without basic inoculations
The goal Create new vaccines
Challenges 4-6: devise vaccine tests, design proteins that trigger protective immunity and understand the body’s immunological responses. Focus on vaccines to prevent malaria, tuberculosis and HIV, which kill more than 5 million people a year
The goal Control insects that transmit agents of disease
Challenges 7-8: develop genetic and chemical strategies to deplete or incapacitate a disease-transmitting insect population, focusing on major killers such as malaria, which infects 350-500 million people a year
The goal Improve nutrition to promote health
Challenge 9: To create a full range of nutrients in a single staple plant species to combat malnutrition, which affects more than 2 billion people worldwide
The goal Improve drug treatment of infectious diseases
Challenge 10: discover ways to prevent microorganisms becoming drug resistant (many drugs that were once successful are losing their effectiveness)
The goal Cure latent and chronic infection
Challenges 11-12: discovering methods to treat latent and chronic infections such as tuberculosis, which nearly a third of the world’s population harbours in their bodies
The goal Measure health status accurately and economically in developing countries
Challenge 13-14: more accurately diagnosing and tracking disease in countries without sophisticated laboratories or reliable medical recordkeeping
source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1671919,00.html 28jun2005
A better banana and a less toxic cassava, childhood vaccines hidden in spores and drunk with fruit juice and many other exotic dreams of public health scientists will share $437 million in grant money, the William and Melinda Gates Foundation announced Monday.
The 43 projects were the winners of a competition announced by Gates two years ago to find new ways to attack the greatest health challenges facing people in poor countries. The contest attracted 1,500 proposals from 70 countries.
The projects, which will get five-year grants of up to $20 million each, are "very visionary and very, very high risk," said Dr. Richard Klausner, who runs the Gates Foundation's global health program. "But if any of them are successful, it will be well worth the investment."
Among the pursuits are vaccines that need no refrigeration and can be given without needles, new ways to kill or cripple mosquitoes, and new ways to attack diseases such as tuberculosis when they are dormant.
As part of receiving a grant, the researchers are allowed to patent anything they invent, but they must guarantee that it will be made available to poor countries at low cost or free.
The Gates grants are "an exceptional commitment to global health research," said Dr. Timothy Evans, assistant director general for policy at the World Health Organization.
In some cases, several teams are competing, taking different paths to the same goal.
Six, for example, are working on ways to deliver vaccines through nasal sprays, inhalers, skin patches or drinks.
Three--one based at Yale University, one in Germany and one in China--are trying to make mice more immunologically human so AIDS vaccines can be tested on them.
Two technologies will compete for making vaccines that do not need to be kept chilled, overcoming a major obstacle to vaccinating children in rural Africa. One envisions encapsulating vaccines in bacterial spores, another in a protective coating already used in cosmetics.
Many winning teams combine researchers from universities, biotech companies and government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Richard Sayre, a plant biologist at Ohio State University, won a $7.5 million grant to develop a better, less toxic cassava, a starchy root containing cyanide that is the staple food for 250 million people in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Other grants are for a more nutritious banana, better rice and more digestible sorghum.
source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0506280244jun28,1,3817151.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed 28jun2005
Some of the world's most pressing health problems may be a little closer to being solved following the award of $450 million to 43 innovative projects aimed at fighting diseases in the developing world.
The research proposals were all submitted in response to the Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, which called for solutions to 14 of the most serious health threats in developing countries.
As well as targeting killer diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, its goals include improved childhood vaccines, controlling insects that cause disease, improving the nutritional content of staple crops and creating more accurate means of identifying, recording and tracking disease in poor countries.
The Gates Foundation, established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates who donated most of the cash, said the Grand Challenges attracted more than 1,500 research proposals from scientists in 75 countries.
"We were overwhelmed by the scientific community's response," said Dr. Harold Varmus, chair of the international scientific board that guides the Grand Challenges initiative.
"Clearly, there's tremendous untapped potential among the world's scientists to address diseases of the developing world."
While billions of dollars are spent on researching life-saving technologies and medicines each year, only a small fraction of that is targeted at the health concerns of the world's poorest nations.
One of the goals of the Gates Foundation is to create ways of tackling sickness and disease that are cheap, portable, accessible and easy to implement.
For example, a team at Tufts University in the U.S. received a $5 million grant to work on creating children's vaccines that don't require constant refrigeration, while a Canadian team from the University of Saskatchewan received $5.6 million to develop a one-dose oral whooping cough vaccine.
Up to 27 million children in the developing world fail to receive basic immunizations each year.
Other projects in the U.S., Australia and Germany received $47 million to look at ways of genetically modifying the nutritional content of staple crops such as bananas, rice and cassava.
Poor nutrition contributes to half of the almost 11 million deaths among children under five each year
Another project at the University of Washington in the U.S. received $15.4 million to develop a handheld device that would enable health workers to perform on-the-spot blood tests to check for bacterial infections and HIV-related illnesses.
And an international team of scientists based at London's Imperial College were given $20 million to work on finding a cure for latent tuberculosis.
"Science has revolutionized health in wealthy countries, while developing countries have been left to fight disease with only a handful of tools that are either grossly inadequate or far too expensive for widespread use," said Dr. Nirmal Kumar Ganguly, a member of the Grand Challenges scientific board and director-general of the Indian Council for Medical Research.
"The Grand Challenges initiative has provided the resources needed to bring together top scientists in both developed and developing countries to help address this imbalance."
British medical charity The Wellcome Trust ($27.1 million) and the Canadian Institutes of Health ($4.5 million) also contributed to the initiative.
source: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/06/28/gates.grants 28jun2005
A University of Saskatchewan scientist is receiving $5.6 million US from the Gates Foundation to come up with an improved whooping cough vaccine.
Saskatoon's Lorne Babiuk is the lead investigator on the five-year project. He been given the responsibility of developing a single-dose version of the vaccine for whooping cough, also known as pertussis.
The disease causes an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 deaths a year, most during early infancy. According to the Gates Foundation, which is financed by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, most vaccines must be given over weeks or months, creating problems for families who must travel long distances to the nearest health clinic. That's why the emphasis is on finding a single-dose vaccine.
The researchers hope that if it works for whooping cough, the procedure could be used to create single-dose vaccines for other diseases.
The whooping cough project is one of 43 aimed at tackling diseases that are prevalent in Third World countries. About 1,500 projects were proposed by researchers around the world.
Other projects look at developing vaccines that don't require refrigeration or needles, preventing insects from transmitting malaria and other diseases, treating latent and chronic diseases such tuberculosis and growing more nutritious crops to combat malnutrion.
The projects are supported by a $450 million from the Gates Foundation, $27.1 million from the Wellcome Trust and $4.5 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)
Babiuk is the director of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) at the U of S.
source: http://sask.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=grant-whooping-cough050628 28jun2005
WASHINGTON — The Gates Foundation, run by Microsoft chief and billionaire, Bill Gates, said it has chosen 43 research projects which together will receive 436.6 mln usd to fight infectious diseases in the world's poorest countries.
The foundation will provide most of the 436 mln usd.
Since 1995 the foundation has invested 5.6 bln uds to improve health in the developing world.
Meanwhile, the British charity Wellcome Trust and the Canadian Institutes of Health have contributed 27.1 mln usd and 4.5 mln usd respectively to the initiative.
As part of 'The Grand Challenges in Global Health' initiative launched in 2003 by the Gates Foundation and the US National Institutes of health (NIH), the research projects will involve scientists from 33 countries, including China, Germany, Spain, Canada, Australia and, above all, the US.
The foundation's goal is to develop low cost, efficient products and technologies that can be easily distributed and used by developing countries.
Of the billions of dollars invested annually in medical research, only a fraction is used to develop new drugs and treatments against infectious diseases, which claim millions of lives every year in developing nations, Gates said in a statement yesterday.
'It's shocking how little research is directed toward the diseases of the world's poorest countries,' he said.
'By harnessing the world's capacity for scientific innovation, I believe we can transform health in the developing world and save millions of lives,' Microsoft's chairman added.
Each of the 43 research projects target 14 major scientific problems identified by the Grand Challenges initiative.
Solving them will provide cure, treatment and prevention for several diseases in developing countries, the statement made jointly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said.
After the Gates Foundation published its 'Grand Challenges' initiative in October 2003, more than 1,500 research projects were proposed by scientists in 75 countries, the foundation statement said.
source: http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/afx/2005/06/28/afx2114151.html 28jun2005
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