Gates Grants: Combating Malaria through Light, Drug Resistance through Gold

Image credit: James Gathany

The Gates Foundation has announced the second round’s winners of its Gates Grand Challenges Exploration Project, which aims to incubate projects that adopt innovative approaches to solving global health problems. 

 Nine projects have been awarded $1 million. Here’s the Gates Foundation’s description of a few of these:

• Dr. Mark Davis from Stanford University is working to create a new method to quantify and profile cellular immune responses to vaccinations, specifically for the influenza and rotavirus vaccines, to improve effectiveness;
• Dr. Dan Feldheim at the University of Colorado is exploring how small molecule-coated gold nanocrystals could be tailored to circumvent many viral and bacterial evolutionary drug resistance mechanisms;
• Dr. Szabolcs Márka and his team from Columbia University are developing a way to create light barriers that can avert mosquitoes from finding their human targets and ultimately reduce malaria transmission;
• Dr. Keith Jerome at the University of Washington is pursuing a way to cure latent HIV infection using novel proteins called homing endonucleases to interfere with HIV DNA in infected cells, effectively eliminating the virus from these cells;
• Dr. Pradipsinh Rathod at the University of Washington is working on strategies to disable hypermutagenesis in malaria parasites during malaria therapy to improve success rates and increase the staying power of new antimalarial drugs. 

The deadline to submit applications for the next round of funding is tomorrow. The topics are eradicating the poliovirus, sanitation technologies, HIV, cell phone applications for health conditions, and maternal health.