On June 11, 2019, Grand Challenges Explorations grants were announced for 59 researchers from 26 different countries around the world. Each will receive US$100,000 to conduct early-stage research projects focusing on one of seven global health and development challenges selected for this Round.

On June 11, 2019, Grand Challenges Explorations grants were announced for 59 researchers from 26 different countries around the world. Each will receive US$100,000 to conduct early-stage research projects focusing on one of seven global health and development challenges selected for this Round.

Grand Challenges Explorations Round 22 Highlights

Application of Metagenomic Next Generation Sequencing to Detect and Identify Pathogens (Round 22)

Tisungane Mvalo and Gerald Tegha of Lilongwe Medical Relief Fund Trust along with Msandeni Chiume at Kamuzu Central Hospital both in Malawi and Pascal Lavoie of the University of British Columbia in Canada will establish metagenomic next generation sequencing at a research laboratory in Malawi to identify pathogens causing infections in young infants to ensure rapid treatment with appropriate therapy and limit unnecessary antibiotic use.

Improving Diagnosis of Sepsis in Young Infants in Africa: Are We Using Antibiotics Appropriately?

Pathogen Identification

Grand Challenges Explorations

Photo Galleries

Photo Gallery

New Approaches for Manufacturing Gut Microbial Biotherapeutics (Round 22)

David Mills of the University of California, Davis in the U.S. will determine whether specific plant-based oligosaccharide formulations can drive mixed-culture growth of selected strains of intestinal bacteria for the low-cost and efficient production of live biotherapeutics. Microbial colonization in the human gut is important for overall health.

Use of Novel Oligosaccharides For Simultaneous Growth of Keystone Bacteria

Microbial Biotherapeutics

Tools and Technologies for Broad-Scale Pest and Disease Surveillance of Crop Plants in Low-Income Countries (Round 22)

Molly Brown of Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture in the U.S. will develop an early warning system for crop diseases for rural farmers in Africa by gathering data using existing infrastructure and mobile tools from commercial partners and applying machine learning pest models.

Disease and Pest Data Collection and Early Warning System

Crop Disease Surveillance

Increasing Demand for Vaccination Services (Round 22)

Bolanle Oyeledun of the Center for Integrated Health Programs in Nigeria will develop a new approach that involves teaching Nigerian parents to leverage their motivations for ensuring their children were fully immunized so that they can persuade other parents in low-income settings to do the same.

Leveraging Enablers of Positive Deviancy to Increase Demand for Vaccination: A Community-Driven Intervention in Nigeria

Immunization Demand

New Approaches for Strategic Prioritization of Agricultural Development Policies (Round 22)

Christine Lamanna and Todd Rosenstock of the World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya will develop a strategy that combines local knowledge and a Bayesian network model to prioritize agricultural policy using Tanzania’s Agriculture and Food Security Investment Plan as a case study.

REAP: Risk-Explicit Agricultural Policy Prioritization

Agricultural Policies

Innovation for WASH in Urban Settings (Round 22)

Shivani Malla of Oxfam in Nepal will improve the management of solid waste in Nepal using technology including geographic information systems (GIS) to map populations and optimize collection routes, mobile phone-based customer services, and digital monitoring for the public and private sectors.

Strengthening Solid Waste Management Systems in Nepal

Water Sanitation Hygiene

Innovations Driving Programmatic Performance in Immunization: Service Experience and Data Use + Measurement (Round 22)

Rumi Chunara of New York University in the U.S. will collect data from mobile phones of healthcare workers to develop algorithms that will help prioritize healthcare resources to increase vaccine coverage in Punjab, Pakistan. Immunization is one of the most cost-effective and successful public health strategies and is estimated to prevent up to three million deaths each year.

Smart Immunization Targeting by Combining Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Tools

Immunization Delivery

Jessica Manning and Fabiano Oliveira of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases along with Daniel Parker of the University of California Irvine, all in the U.S., will develop a combinatorial approach to better define the incidence of vector-borne diseases in Cambodia in order to limit their transmission.

Identification and Characterization of Vector-Borne Pathogens and Vector Exposures to Define Regional Biomonitoring Strategies and Vector Control Efforts in Cambodia

Christophe Lacroix of ETH Zürich in Switzerland will develop a new method to grow mixed strains of bacteria in bioreactors more efficiently and at lower cost for producing microbial-based biotherapeutics by immobilizing the bacteria on porous polysaccharide gel beads.

Micro-Beads Building Trophic Networks for Gut Microbial Biotherapeutic Production

William Kunin of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom will develop methods to monitor agricultural pest outbreaks in Africa using data from dual-polarization weather radar.

Broad-Scale Agricultural Pest Monitoring in Africa Using Dual-Polarization Weather Radar

Nico Vandaele and Catherine Decouttere from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium along with workers at the St. Francis of Assissi Community Dispensary in Kenya will develop a decision support tool for community workers who vaccinate children that incorporates the diverse characteristics and needs of the local parents and caregivers to help them improve vaccination uptake.

PERSO-MAP: Persona Map for Community Worker Decision Support

Kindie Tesfaye-Fantaye of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico will develop a computational model that incorporates the variable characteristics of households and farms to better predict the outcomes of agricultural interventions in Ethiopia in order to inform policy choices.

Application of Agent-Based Modeling for Policy Prioritization in Sub-Saharan Africa

Doyeon Pi of PiQuant and Ki-Hun Jeong of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology both in the Republic of Korea will develop their small, low-cost, water quality test equipment and a GIS-based monitoring system to continuously map water quality in real time across Vietnam.

Low-Cost Water Pollution Spectrometer for Monitoring Map

Noshad Ali of Precision Health Consultants Pvt Ltd in Pakistan will develop a speech recognition platform to record child vaccination data and increase efficiency at vaccination clinics.

Structured Speech Recognition Platform

Cara Brook, Jean-Michel Héraud, and Soa Fy Andriamandimby of the Pasteur Institute in Madagascar, and Jessica Metcalf of Princeton University in the U.S. will establish metagenomic next generation sequencing (NGS) in Madagascar to analyze samples from undiagnosed fever patients and from bats to identify bat-derived viruses that cause human infectious diseases and help develop new diagnostics.

Metagenomics and the Etiology of Zoonotic Disease: Deciphering Bat-to-Human Viral Transmission in Madagascar

Ahmad Khalil of Boston University in the U.S. will develop a low-cost bioreactor platform to simultaneously optimize growth conditions of multiple bacterial species for large scale production of biotherapeutics.

A Low-Cost, Highly Scalable Continuous Culture System for Rapid Optimization and Precise Tuning of Gut Microbial Formulations

Melanie Bannister-Tyrrell of Ausvet in Australia will create an SMS-based communication system for farmers in Kenya to anonymously report crop disease and pest infestations and generate surveillance data to minimize crop loss.

Surveillance as a Side Effect of Service

Suparna Kalghatgi of Bempu Health Private Limited in India will introduce an online, personalized messaging platform to educate parents and caregivers on immunization and address their concerns to increase vaccine compliance and decrease childhood morbidity in India.

Building Vaccination Infrastructure on the BabyOnTrack System

Rachel Sklar of Pit Pumpers Ltd. in Rwanda will develop an interactive SMS messaging platform to increase community use of companies to safely empty pit latrines in Rwanda by using communication to increase demand and thereby decrease cost and wait-times for service calls.

Demand-Responsive Cluster Generation for Pit Emptying

Peter Wagstaff of Self Help Africa in Ireland will build an advanced machine learning algorithm that automatically analyzes high-resolution satellite images for near real-time, low-cost detection of crop pests and diseases across wide, varied landscapes.