Talented Indians researchers are targeted: Bill Gates' foundation

Updated on: Friday, April 03, 2009

New Delhi: India is specifically chosen to promote and advocate the round three of The Grand Challenges Exploration, a five-year $ 100 million initiative to encourage bold and unconventional research on new global health solution.

The topic areas for the proposal are creating low cost antagonistic for priority global health condition, new tools to accelerate eradication of malaria, new vaccinations for diarrhoea, HIV, malaria, pneumonia and tuberculosis and new ways to increase mucosal immunity (increasing immunity for lung and intestinal diseases).

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation announced $100,000 grants for researchers to develop innovative ideas to address maternal and child health care issues. The third round of the worldwide initiative is targeted particularly at Indian researchers.

'We hope to hear from researchers of every age and every continent, and from disciplines that don't typical focus on global health or even biomedical research. India has great potential and a pool of engineers, doctors and creative minds. Yet in our previous two rounds we have received little response from Indians,' Andrew C. Serazin, programme officer for the project.

The foundation and an independent group of reviewers will select the most innovative proposals and grant will awarded around three months from the May 28 proposal submission deadline.

Initial grants will be of $100,000 each. Projects showing promise thereafter could get an additional funding of upto $1 million. About 80-100 applicants are likely to be selected globally.

To promote and advocate the project, the foundation has approached institutes like All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D) and other facilitating partners.

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Talented Indians researchers are targeted: Bill Gates' foundation

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