Skip to main content

Grand Challenges

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Main menu

  • About
  • Challenges
  • Awarded Grants
  • News
  • Grant Opportunities
  • Search

You are here

  1. Home
  2. Awarded Grants
  3. 2006
  4. 2017
  5. 2013

Print link

Print

Awarded Grants

Filter by Initiative

  • Grand Challenges Explorations Apply Grand Challenges Explorations filter (219)
  • Grand Challenges for Development Apply Grand Challenges for Development filter (26)
  • Grand Challenges Brazil Apply Grand Challenges Brazil filter (12)
  • Grand Challenges India Apply Grand Challenges India filter (10)
  • Grand Challenges Africa Apply Grand Challenges Africa filter (8)
  • Grand Challenges Apply Grand Challenges filter (4)
  • Grand Challenges China Apply Grand Challenges China filter (4)

Filter by Challenge

Filter by Awarded Year

  • 2019 Apply 2019 filter (121)
  • 2018 Apply 2018 filter (129)
  • (-) Remove 2017 filter 2017 (98)
  • 2016 Apply 2016 filter (162)
  • 2015 Apply 2015 filter (171)
  • 2014 Apply 2014 filter (152)
  • (-) Remove 2013 filter 2013 (184)
  • 2012 Apply 2012 filter (244)
  • 2011 Apply 2011 filter (258)
  • 2010 Apply 2010 filter (142)
  • 2009 Apply 2009 filter (157)
  • 2008 Apply 2008 filter (105)
  • (-) Remove 2006 filter 2006 (1)
  • 2005 Apply 2005 filter (43)

Filter by Country

Grand Challenges is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. Each initiative is an experiment in the use of challenges to focus innovation on making an impact. Individual challenges address some of the same problems, but from differing perspectives.

Sort by:
Date Awarded
Title (Z-A)
10
25
50
100

A Birth Control for Nuanced Control

Hope NeighborCamber CollectiveSeattle, Washington, United States
Grand Challenges Explorations
Family Planning
14 Jun 2017

Hope Neighbor of Camber Collective in the U.S. will use applied behavioral research to better understand how and why young, sexually active women who are approaching marriage in West Africa make decisions on family planning products. Women appear to regulate their fertility differently based on their specific situation and needs. Young women who are not yet married tend to use unsafe or ineffective practices such as herbal remedies and abortion. They will recruit women in this group to fill out journals to generate evidence on the nature of their fertility planning needs and identify specific attributes of contraceptives that would fit better into their daily lives. They will also develop hypothetical prototype contraceptives by involving the participants in a card game to identify ways of modifying existing contraceptives, such as enabling over-the-counter availability, and key attributes for future contraceptives that better suit their needs.

A Cell-Based Screen for Discovery of a Macrofilaricide

Kelly JohnstonLiverpool School of Tropical MedicineLiverpool, United Kingdom
Grand Challenges Explorations
Neglected Tropical Diseases
8 Oct 2013

Kelly Johnston and others from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will develop a cell line from a parasitic filarial nematode worm that can proliferate continuously in vitro to enable high-throughput screening of candidate anti-filarial drugs. Current drug screening efforts are limited by the complex life cycle of the worms and the difficulties of obtaining sufficient numbers of worms. They will isolate worm cells from various life cycle stages and use a high-content screening approach to monitor thousands of cells cultured under different conditions to increase the probability of detecting a stably growing cell line. Once one or more stable cell lines have been produced, they will establish optimal culture conditions for drug screening assays.

A Continuous in vitro Culture System for Cryptosporidium

L. David SibleyWashington University in St. LouisSt. Louis, Missouri, United States
Grand Challenges Explorations
Human and Animal Health
10 Oct 2013

L. David Sibley at Washington University in St. Louis in the U.S. is developing a long-term in vitro intestinal epithelial culture system for the intracellular parasite Cryptosporidium, which causes severe diarrheal disease in both humans and animals, and is refractory to many anti-parasitic drugs. Currently, Cryptosporidium can only be grown in infected calves or in short-term in vitro cultures, which cannot be used for the high-throughput chemical screens needed to identify new drugs. In Phase I, they optimized the in vitro culture of isolated intestinal stem cells from human and mouse biopsies, and identified factors to control their differentiation into primary epithelial monolayers, which can better support the growth of intestinal pathogens. This led to around a five-fold increase in the rate of asexual replication of Cryptosporidium, which was enough to successfully test a chemical growth inhibitor. In Phase II, they will further improve culture conditions to support longer-term in vitro growth of Cryptosporidium, which will then be tested for stability and infectivity. They will also develop antibodies against specific developmental stages to help identify culture conditions that enable the parasite to undergo a complete life cycle, which will be valuable for culturing and screening efforts.

A Decoy Artificial Snail Host (DASH) to Control S. mansoni

Edwin RoutledgeBrunel UniversityLondon, United Kingdom
Grand Challenges Explorations
Neglected Tropical Diseases
9 Oct 2013

Edwin Routledge of Brunel University in the United Kingdom will work towards developing an artificial snail decoy to attract the parasite Schistosoma mansoni, which causes chronic disease. The parasites first develop inside aquatic snails, which they locate via chemical cues (chemoattractants), before they can infect humans. Routledge will identify the relevant chemoattractants by isolating and fractionating chemicals from the snails, and test the ability of these chemicals to attract the parasites. Effective chemoattractants will be characterized and ultimately incorporated into a biodegradable matrix to generate an artificial snail that is easy to deploy in the field and can trap and destroy the parasites, thereby reducing human transmission.

A Demand-Driven Supply Chain Technology Demonstrator

Sara GrobbelaarStellenbosch UniversityStellenbosch, South Africa
Grand Challenges Explorations
Health Supply Chains
1 Nov 2017

Sara Grobbelaar of Stellenbosch University in South Africa will develop a platform that can analyze existing real-time data on the stocks of health products at clinics across South Africa and present it to all players in the supply chain to ensure products are available when needed. In partnership with a Northern academic institution they will collect and sort relevant data, analyze trends, and develop decision-making tools. The platform will allow analysis, modeling, and forecasting in the health product supply chain so that unexpected changes such as supply disruptions or epidemics can be accommodated.

A Fortified School Meal Product to Deworm School Children

Elijah SongokKenya Medical Research InstituteNairobi, Kenya
Grand Challenges Explorations
Neglected Tropical Diseases
8 Apr 2013

Elijah Songok of the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kenya will design and test a fortified school meal product with deworming properties for treating soil transmitted helminths (parasitic worms) among schoolchildren in developing countries. Schoolchildren are most at risk of infection-associated morbidities such as stunting and chronic dysentery. However, current mass drug administration strategies are associated with the development of drug resistance, and may not be sustainable long term. They will fortify cornflour with seed extracts of the tropical fruit, Carica papaya (pawpaw), which can significantly increase clearance of the parasite, and use it to make porridge, which is cheap and a common school meal snack in developing countries. They will test its efficacy in a randomized pilot study in six elementary schools in rural Kenya.

A Human Powered Precision Seeder

Ricardo Capúcio de ResendeUniversidade Federal de ViçosaViçosa, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Grand Challenges Explorations
Women Farmers
17 Oct 2013

Ricardo Capúcio de Resende of Universidade Federal de Viçosa in Brazil will design and test a new machine to enable women smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to more efficiently and effectively plant seeds. He has designed a new seeder concept using only two rotating parts, which is light, easy to use and maintain, and can simultaneously plant two crops. He will query local manufacturers and users to further develop the design, and then produce prototypes that will be bench- and field-tested for manufacturability and performance. The results will be used to produce the final seeder design, and this design concept could be applied to other agricultural machines.

A Low-Cost Tuberculosis Diagnostic Test for Pregnant Women

Niaina RakotosamimananaInstitut Pasteur de MadagascarAntananarivo, Madagascar
Grand Challenges Africa
Africa-Innovation Seed Grants
28 Sep 2017

Niaina Rakotosamimanana of the Pasteur Institute of Madagascar in Madagascar will develop a low-cost tuberculosis diagnostic and molecular test for pregnant women using dried blood samples drawn from finger pricks. This dried-blood spot based test is minimally invasive, can be used in remote areas where people lack access to all-weather roads and lack of infrastructure that has direct impact on health outcomes. The dried-blood spot can be sent via mail to the health centers for testing without established cold chain methods and meets several of the criteria set by the World Health Organization regarding quality of TB diagnostic tools. Dried-blood samples have a wide range of diagnostic capacity and have been shown to have advantages over other biological samples in terms of cost, ease of collection, transport, and storage.

A Low-Cost, Electricity-Free Oxygen Concentrator

Bryn SobottUniversity of MelbourneMelbourne, Victoria, Australia
Grand Challenges for Development
Saving Lives at Birth
16 Dec 2013

Our proposal will provide this life-saving treatment to isolated, extremely resource poor people by obviating the need for electricity. This will be achieved by applying recently developed hydrological engineering approaches to extract the pressure differential required for the adsorption process exploited by Oxygen concentrators. This project aims to develop and test an electricity free Oxygen concentrator suitable for a developing world health facility. This represents a major paradigm shift, as to-date the problem has been interpreted as how to supply electricity to an Oxygen concentrator. In comparison with solar and generator based approaches the prototype will require significantly less capital cost and maintenance. Further, construction out of locally available components will empower the community to independently and sustainably access this life-saving treatment.

A Marketplace App for Connected Pathology Services in Africa

Jacob McKnightUniversity of OxfordOxford, United Kingdom
Grand Challenges Explorations
Diagnostics Systems
1 Nov 2017

Jacob McKnight and Mike Wilson of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom will develop a simple application that contains information about the quality, location, and the nature and cost of services provided by the different pathology laboratories in Kenya so that doctors and patients can choose the one that best suits their needs. They will conduct surveys to collect key information on the pathology laboratories in the Nairobi area, and consult with doctors and medical associations to find out how they use those laboratory services and what needs to be improved. They will build the application using these data and in collaboration with users. Ultimately, the system should also help to improve the overall quality of services.

Pages

  • Currently on page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • Page 4
  • Page 5
  • Page 6
  • Page 7
  • Page 8
  • Page 9
  • …
  • Next page
  • Last page
Sort by:
Date Awarded
Title (Z-A)
10
25
50
100

Contact us

Contact us

  • General Inquiries
  • Media Inquiries

Footer - Receive Updates

Receive updates

  • Sign up for email updates

Footer

  • Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
© 2003-2019. Grand Challenges. All Rights Reserved.

PLEASE REVIEW OUR UPDATED PRIVACY & COOKIES NOTICE

This site uses cookies and similar technologies to store information on your computer or device. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the placement of these cookies and similar technologies. Read our updated Privacy & Cookies Notice to learn more.