Create New Ways to Protect Against Infectious Disease (Round 4)

Roadblock:

Immunization is one of the most cost-effective health interventions currently available. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need to expand the set of safe and effective solutions beyond that of conventional vaccines and drugs that can be used in resource-limited settings to protect against infectious disease.

What We Are Looking For:

The goal of this topic is to generate transformational approaches to protecting individuals and populations against infectious disease, as opposed to incremental improvements on conventional health solutions. We seek proposals that are "off the beaten track," daring in premise, and clearly different from the approaches currently being developed or employed. Proposals must have an underlying scientific rationale, a clear hypothesis, and an associated plan for how their idea would be tested or validated.

Specific diagnostic approaches for priority global health conditions should be submitted under: Create Low-Cost Diagnostics for Priority Global Health Conditions.

Specific approaches to inducing long-lasting protection against pathogens at mucosal surfaces should be submitted under: Create New Ways to Induce and Measure Mucosal Immunity.

We will not consider funding for:

• Approaches to vaccine discovery such as those that focus on developing conventional vaccine components (antigens, adjuvants, vaccine vectors, formulations) or on advancing the development of specific vaccine leads);
• Conventional drug or insecticide discovery and screening efforts or investigations of specific drug candidates;
• Water and sanitation solutions;
• Exclusively social or educational interventions;
• Basic epidemiology or burden of disease studies of infectious disease pathogens;
• Basic studies of pathogen and human biology lacking the potential for translation of the outcomes into specific practical health solutions;
• Ideas without a hypothesis that is testable and without a clear linkage to a rationale that supports the approach being proposed;
• Testing of interventions without a clear hypothesis of the role of the intervention in mediating protection against infectious disease human protection and, importantly, a plan for how the impact of that intervention would be measured.

For information on The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s priority global health conditions, 
please click here.