Bill Gates' foundation targets Indians

Updated on: Friday, April 03, 2009

New Delhi: The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation on Thursday announced $100,000 grants for researchers to develop innovative ideas to address maternal and child health care issues. The third round of the world-wide 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, told reporters here.

Andrew and his partner Joseph Torres have come specifically to India 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.

In the previous two rounds, the project received around 7,000 applications from 118 countries and Indians accounted for just three percent of it.

"The initiative uses a streamline, online grant making process. Applications are only two pages and the preliminary data about the proposed research is not even required," Torres explained.

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.

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

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.

The proposals can be sent via www.grandchallenges.org/explorations.

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Bill Gates' foundation targets Indians

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