Grand Challenges Explorations, a new initiative by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is awarding grants to help scientists across the globe pursue ideas that have never before been tested for solving major health problems.
Deadline: May 30, 2008
Website: www.gcgh.org/explorations

Beginning March 31, 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will accept grant
proposals for the first funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations, a new US$100
million initiative to help scientists across the globe pursue ideas that have never before
been tested for solving major health problems.
Initial grants through the Explorations initiative will be $100,000 each, and projects
showing success will have the opportunity to receive additional funding of $1 million or
more. The initiative will use an agile, accelerated grant-making process – applications
will be two pages, and preliminary data are not required. The foundation will select and
award grants within approximately three months from the proposal submission deadline
of May 30, 2008.
Grand Challenges Explorations is an expansion of the Grand Challenges in Global
Health initiative, which was launched in 2003 to spur the discovery of new technologies
to improve global health. The Explorations initiative focuses on research areas where
creative, unorthodox thinking is most urgently needed.
Topics for First Funding Round
The first funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations will consider proposals in four
topic areas:
• Creating new ways to protect against infectious diseases: Untried or unproven
approaches to protect against infectious diseases, including harnessing natural
or synthetic immune responses, or eliminating the need for an effective immune
response.
• Creating drugs or delivery systems that limit the emergence of resistance:
Innovative ideas for discovering or delivering drugs that are less likely to lose
effectiveness because of resistance developing in the disease-causing agent.
• Creating new ways to prevent or cure HIV infection: Innovative ideas for HIV
prevention or treatment methods that fall outside current research on vaccines,
antiretroviral drugs, and other biomedical and behavior-change strategies.
• Exploring the basis for latency in TB: Unconventional approaches to
understanding latent TB infection, with the goal of discovering new ways to
identify and eliminate latent infection, and break the cycle of TB transmission.
Grant proposals for the first Explorations funding round will be accepted online at
www.gcgh.org/explorations from March 31 through May 30, 2008; applicants must
register intent to submit a proposal by May 15, 2008.
Once the first Explorations funding round is complete, the foundation will announce
subsequent funding rounds. Topics may vary over time, to cover a range of priorities in
global health research.
Full descriptions of the initial topic areas and application instructions are available at
www.gcgh.org/explorations.