News

Welcome Remarks: Kedest Tesfagiorgis, Deputy Director, Global Partnerships &amp; Grand Challenges, Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation

Welcome Remarks: Kedest Tesfagiorgis, Deputy Director, Global Partnerships &amp; Grand Challenges, Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation

Welcome Remarks: Kedest Tesfagiorgis

Grand Challenges

Video

Annual Meeting Videos

Host Country Welcome: Renu Swarup, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India

Host Country Welcome: Renu Swarup, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India

Host Country Welcome: Renu Swarup

Welcome Remarks: Harsh Vardhan, Honourable Minister for Science and Technology, Health and Family Welfare &amp; Earth Sciences, Government of India

Welcome Remarks: Harsh Vardhan, Honourable Minister for Science and Technology, Health and Family Welfare &amp; Earth Sciences, Government of India

Opening Remarks: Harsh Vardhan

Spotlight: Grand Challenges India

Spotlight: Grand Challenges India

Grand Challenges Annual Meeting Videos

In the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation’s first-ever U.S. education Grand Challenge, we sought to identify partners to design solutions to make Algebra 1 more accessible, relevant, and collaborative for students who are Black, Latino, English Learners, and/or experiencing poverty. We are proud to announce 15 Phase 1 planning and prototyping grants of $100,000 each to a diverse and impressive cohort of organizations. These organizations will work to develop, test, and refine their solutions. Read summaries of all the awarded grants here. For more information, read the blog post and fact sheet.

Balance the Equation - A Grand Challenge for Algebra 1 Grants Awarded

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Announcement

Fifteen researchers from 6 countries were awarded grants under the Grand Challenges family of initiatives. Read summaries of all the grants awarded for the following Grand Challenges Explorations initiative: Innovations for Improving the Impact of Health Campaigns (Round 25) and the following two Grand Challenges initiatives: Improving Access to and Use of Safe and Appropriate Cesarean Section and Accelerating Discovery for Non-Hormonal Contraceptives.

Grand Challenges Initiatives Grants Awarded

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Grand Challenges Explorations

The Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation is accepting applications through the Grand Challenges and Grand Challenges Explorations initiatives for the following three requests for proposals. Their goal is to harness innovation around emerging technologies for transformative solutions to key global health and agricultural development problems, and they seek to anchor the work with the investigators and implementors closest to the problems, who have the knowledge and perspective to direct the right approaches to the right parts of the problems to help ensure success. Smart Farming Innovations for Small-Scale Producers Integrating Tradition and Technology for Fermented Foods for Maternal Nutrition New Approaches to Integrating Molecular Surveillance into Malaria Control Programs

Emerging Technologies Grand Challenges Announced

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2019 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting Call-to-Action Grants Awarded Thirteen researchers from 6 countries received grants under the 2019 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting Call-to-Action, 12 of them awarded as collaborative projects between organizations. This request for proposals provided participants of the Grand Challenges annual meeting – held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in October 2019 - with an opportunity to build on their interactions at the meeting and the combination of perspectives and expertise unique to the meeting.

2019 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting Call-to-Action Grants Awarded

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Announcements

Why we invest in innovation

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Blog Post

There's a creative principle that "form follows function," and it holds true for this year's Grand Challenges Annual Meeting. The function: Thousands of innovators from all over the world come together to figure out how to address the challenge of COVID-19 - and how to use its lessons to address other urgent challenges in global health. The form: Our first ever virtual meeting, across approximately two dozen time zones. In the past six months, the global health R&amp;D community has seen the rest of the world come around to its point of view en masse -the future depends on the world's ability to invent and deliver health solutions. From October 19-21, we hope that many of the people actually doing the inventing and delivering will build on that shared sense of urgency to create a short-term agenda for COVID-19, a medium-term agenda for epidemic preparedness and response, and a long-term agenda for global health and development equity. We are keeping many features of the meeting that participants have come to know and love, including plenary sessions with leaders from across sectors, cutting-edge scientific roundtables, and scientific tracks covering a range of priorities. We are also adding new features to take advantage of our virtual platform, including GC TV, a networking lounge, and a GC Library. In this crisis, we've seen innovation happening faster than ever. Health researchers have worked together in new ways to generate breakthroughs. These new models of partnership don't have to be just a one-off response to a single disease. They can form the basis of a more collaborative approach to global health that improves the world's response to every disease. We are optimistic that this year's Grand Challenges Annual Meeting can trigger the conversations that need to happen to leverage these advances. The Annual Meeting is a joint enterprise, and this year we especially want to thank a few partners. India’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), which administers Grand Challenges India. Before the pandemic, BIRAC planned to co-host this year's meeting in New Delhi. When it became clear that this would be impossible, BIRAC didn't waver, and we are pleased to include a focus on the Indian experience in many aspects of the meeting. We are supported by several more key partners, including the Government of India’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). WomenLift Health is co-hosting the second day's plenary session and Keystone Symposia is co-hosting the third day's. Our partnership with WomenLift Health began last year, and we are pleased to see it growing this year. We also thank our long-standing global funding partners USAID, Wellcome Trust, and Grand Challenges Canada, as well as the growing number of Grand Challenges initiatives that are enabling governments to fund local innovation for impact, including in Africa, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Israel, Japan, Peru, South Africa, South Korea, and Thailand. This year's plenary sessions will feature heads of state, heads of companies, and heads of laboratories, all discussing COVID-19, pandemic preparedness, and the future of global health R&amp;D. The roundtables will cover everything from cloud computing and its uses in development to design thinking for gender equality. The scientific tracks are as diverse as ever, with a focus ranging from Addressing Challenges to Manage COVID-19: The Indian Experience to Leveraging Pathogen Genetic Sequencing. Finally, attendees will have an opportunity to apply for the Annual Meeting Call-to-Action, a Grand Challenges experiment launched two years ago by Trevor Mundel, Gates foundation President of the Global Health division, to spur new collaborations during the meeting. Also launching at the meeting are three new Grand Challenges requests for proposals. Their goal is to harness innovation around emerging technologies for transformative solutions to key global health and agricultural development problems, and they seek to anchor the work with the investigators and implementors closest to the problems. Underlying the project of global health is the idea of mutuality. One way or another, we are all in this together. We've seen the downsides of that reality. One sick person over there eventually means many sick people right here. But we are also seeing the beauty in mutuality. No one is safe until we're all safe. And that's why we've seen a historic outpouring of creativity and devotion from every corner to make sure that we are all safe, no matter who we are, no matter where we live, no matter how little money we have. You can follow the Annual Meeting on the foundation's social media channels and with hashtag #Grandchallenges. Thanks to all for working so hard to make sure that every single human being receives the full benefit of scientific progress.

Grand Challenges: Partnerships for Solving Today’s Problems and Tomorrow’s

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Why Grand Challenges

For Black and Latino students, and students experiencing poverty, mastering Algebra 1 is the X-Factor

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Mastering Algebra 1 is the X-Factor

Remembering Bill Gates Sr., our 'north star'

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Blog Posts

The next epidemic is coming. Here's how we can make sure we're ready

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Gates Notes

Why Our Foundation Takes On Grand Challenges

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Why I Gave My Blood to Defeat Dengue

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National Academy of Sciences: Using the Power of Science to Improve Lives

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Grand Challenges-related posts from the blog of Bill Gates

Gates Notes (Grand Challenges)

Grand Challenges 2018

Retrospective Videos

2014 Grand Challenges meeting video – a retrospective beginning with the launch of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative and continuing through to the current network of Grand Challenges partnerships and initiatives

2014 Grand Challenges meeting video – a retrospective beginning with the launch of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative and continuing through to the current network of Grand Challenges partnerships and initiatives

Grand Challenges - The First Ten Years

Grand Challenges Explorations has now completed ten rounds of grant applications. Learn more about the program’s goals and hear grantees explain their research on a diverse set of projects. Grantees: Antonio Avila, Eliane Ubalijoro, Fredros Okumu, Ron Quinn, Michelle McIntosh, Pradip Rathod, Tim Geary.

Grand Challenges Explorations has now completed ten rounds of grant applications. Learn more about the program’s goals and hear grantees explain their research on a diverse set of projects. Grantees: Antonio Avila, Eliane Ubalijoro, Fredros Okumu, Ron Quinn, Michelle McIntosh, Pradip Rathod, Tim Geary.

Introduction to Grand Challenges Explorations: May 2013

The Grand Challenges in Global Health program was launched in 2003 as a partnership between the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Learn more about the initiative and some of the original projects awarded grants for innovative approaches to global health. Grantees: James Dale, Richard Sayre, Scott O’Neill, Adrian Hill, George Shaw, Lawrence Zwiebel.

The Grand Challenges in Global Health program was launched in 2003 as a partnership between the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Learn more about the initiative and some of the original projects awarded grants for innovative approaches to global health. Grantees: James Dale, Richard Sayre, Scott O’Neill, Adrian Hill, George Shaw, Lawrence Zwiebel.

Grand Challenges in Global Health: The First Five Years

Historical narratives across the Grand Challenges family of initiatives

Video Retrospectives

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), mothers should start breastfeeding in the first hour after birth and feed their babies nothing but breast milk for the first six months of their lives. A diet of nothing but breast milk, in addition to keeping babies from being exposed to pathogen-tainted food, can give them all the nutrients they need and provide them with anti-infectious and anti-inflammatory agents, growth factors, and prebiotics. Breast milk also contains antibodies against infectious diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea, two major causes of child mortality around the world. For babies born prematurely, underweight, or ill, breast milk is all the more beneficial. But at least 40% of premature babies born in poor countries have no access to their mothers' milk, because their mothers are ill, for example, or have died in childbirth, or because they're separated from their mothers for other medical reasons. For babies whose birth weight is low, the WHO recommends using pasteurized donor human milk. The machines used to pasteurize donor milk, though, are incredibly expensive - they can cost up to $100,000, far more than the entire budget of a rural health center in a poor country. Health workers have always done the best they could; some, for example, have pasteurized donor milk by heating it in boiling water. But by doing so without a monitoring system, they risk underheating the milk, leaving potential contaminants alive, or overheating it, destroying the beneficial antibodies in the milk and increasing the risk of pneumonia and infectious diarrhea. When Dr. Kiersten Israel-Ballard, who had been working on helping HIV-positive mothers breastfeed safely, saw this in health centers in South Africa, she assumed there had to be a less expensive way for them to pasteurize milk. She couldn't find one, though, so, with the help of a Grand Challenges Explorations grant to explore new nutritional approaches for healthy infant growth, she invented it instead. She had already designed a simple way for HIV positive mothers to heat their breast milk so that the virus wouldn't be transmitted to their babies, so she got to work making that method more rigorous. The result was FoneAstra, a small, inexpensive pasteurizer with a sensor that monitors the temperature of a hot-water bath. Meanwhile, thanks to computer scientists at the University of Washington, a mobile phone app connected to the sensor walks a healthcare worker through every step of the pasteurization process, from donation to storage. That in itself was an important advance, but while working to solve the narrow problem of inexpensive pasteurization, Dr. Israel-Ballard discovered a much bigger problem - a gap that the global health community hadn't even realized was there. A follow-on grant helped her work with the Human Milk Banking Association of South Africa and the KwaZulu-Natal Ministry of Health to establish small-scale, FoneAstra-based milk banks in five hospitals as part of a broader provincial breastfeeding campaign; in doing so, she realized just how little attention donor milk got from the global health community. Nutrition funders and policy-makers, she discovered, tend to focus on breast-feeding in healthy communities. Newborn-care people, meanwhile, tend to focus on more immediate medical conditions like respiratory care, paying less attention to breast-feeding in low-birth weight and vulnerable newborns. There were no global guidelines for setting up a human milk bank, no standardized training on using one, and no repository of best practices. Nobody was even keeping comprehensive track of how many babies around the world needed donor milk. So she got to work. She took her cue from Brazil, which has the most innovative donor-milk program in the world. Many human milk banks are independent systems in hospitals: a room or set of rooms, like a pharmacy, whose only function is to process and distribute donor milk. But Brazil has taken a different approach, integrating over 200 "houses of lactation" into newborn care wards all over the country. Houses of lactation started as part of a huge push by Brazil to reduce infant mortality: officials trained doctors and staff and conducted publicity campaigns aimed at parents to help them understand breastfeeding as a central part of childbearing. Houses of lactation were marketed not as clinical dispensaries but as centers where mothers and their children could be supported medically, physically, and emotionally, whether it was in the form of milk donation, breastfeeding training, childrearing support, or just a friendly environment to play. Brazil made milk banks places where nursing mothers wanted to go. As a result of this and other innovations in infant and maternal health, in the last thirty years the mortality rate of Brazilian infants has fallen by almost 75%. As soon as she saw this, Dr. Israel-Ballard realized that integration was the key. Since then, she's worked with stakeholders and ministries of health all over the world to develop the first set of global operational standards and to help set up national guidelines on breast milk banking in ways that don't just provide milk to premature, underweight babies - by taking their cue from Brazil's success, strengthening lactation support for mothers of these babies and turning milk banks into places mothers want to go to, they actually significantly increase breastfeeding rates in the community. Problems in global health are so complex that it's impossible for one person to be an expert in all of them. That's why programs tend to focus on one area. But neither babies nor mothers are siloed like that - they need support that meets both of them, as a unit, wherever they are. Dr. Israel-Ballard's goal now is for the nutrition and newborn-care communities to develop an integrated approach that provides exactly that.

Banking Human Milk

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Grand Challenges Explorations (2008-2018)

In many areas of health, centuries of scientific discoveries mean that we know a lot. When it comes to gut health, though, we're a little behind. In fact, it wasn't until this century that scientists started talking widely about the gut microbiome - an entire "organ" few people were fully aware we have. That means the territory of gut health is wide open, and some of the most exciting work being done today is exploring this new frontier. Dr. Phillip Tarr is one of the explorers, and what he's discovered may help us treat a lot of sick and malnourished children in poor countries a lot more effectively. The human gut contains, along with the stomach and the intestine, hundreds of square feet of intestinal lining - enough to cover the floor of a small apartment. In a healthy person, the cells of that lining allow water, ions, and nutrients to pass through into the blood, but the spaces between them are sealed tightly enough to make sure that these are the only things that get out. On the other hand, in a person with increased intestinal permeability, often referred to as a leaky gut, those seals break down, which can allow things like toxins, bacteria, and food particles to leak through the intestinal lining into the blood. The leakier the gut, the more passes through, and those dangerous substances can then get into the blood stream, where they can have serious effects on children's health and development. In rich countries, leaky gut is most often a problem (and a target for treatment) in relatively specific conditions like Crohn's disease and celiac disease. In poor countries, though, where hundreds of millions of children suffer from malnutrition and intestinal disease associated with poor sanitation, it's a much bigger and more consequential problem. Malnutrition and gut disease are both strongly associated with a dangerous condition called stunting, in which kids' bodies and brains aren't developing the way they should be. We don't have incontrovertible proof that leaky gut causes stunting - just as we don't have incontrovertible proof that smoking causes cancer - but researchers in the field believe that it does, and that it's worth measuring as a proxy. Up until now, though, there's been only one way to measure leaky gut in humans: drink a solution with a sugar in it that's too large to pass through a healthy intestinal lining, wait several hours, and then measure how much of the sugar appears in the urine (sometimes a sugar small enough to pass through a healthy lining is also included for comparison). The leakier the gut, the more of the large sugar will pass through. But there are a lot of drawbacks to this test. People disagree on exactly how many hours' worth of urine you need to collect - some say one hour, some say six. The urine has to be preserved incredibly quickly so that bacteria don't start to eat up the sugars you're trying to measure. And, perhaps most problematic for poor countries, there are very few labs in the world that analyze the urine for these sugars really well - and they take weeks to do it. Add it all up, and the only test we have for leaky gut is both imprecise and impractical in a lot of the countries where the problems it causes are most serious. Or at least that was the only test we had. Dr. Tarr, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, who also trained in infectious diseases and microbiology, was struck by the fact that the difficulties in testing for leaky gut weren't related to the physiology of the condition, as is the case for many disorders. Instead, the problems were based in the technology available to us. He started to wonder about a test that would allow healthcare workers to give kids something to drink and measure right away how much of it got into the blood stream, without having to take any blood or urine samples at all. In the meantime, he found out about a company called MediBeacon - also located in St. Louis, as luck would have it - which was developing a kidney-function test using chemical compounds called fluorophores, which can be detected and measured easily through the skin. Together, he and MediBeacon's Dr. Rick Dorshow began to explore how to use fluorophores to test for leaky gut, too. They brought that question to us in 2013; with a Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) grant to find new tools in the treatment of intestinal dysfunction, they started working to find an answer. What they found, working with rats as an experiment model, was that fluorophores didn't just work - they actually worked better than sugars. The sugar test is good at telling you whether or not somebody has a leaky gut. Fluorophores are, too, but they do a better job than sugars of telling you just how leaky it is. Dr. Tarr and Dr. Dorshow then won a follow-on GCE grant to make the fluorophores as easily measurable as possible, perform preclinical toxicity studies, and human trials are expected to start very soon. If all goes well, then before too long healthcare workers in poor countries will be able to give kids a drink, wait a couple minutes, and use an inexpensive skin sensor to find out instantly both whether or not and just how leaky their gut is. This new tool might provide a way forward in one of the biggest challenges in the field of childhood stunting. Currently, if healthcare workers think children might be at risk of stunting, they can treat them in various ways, but they can't know whether the treatment is succeeding until they can measure changes in their rate of growth, which can take half a year or more. If children are found to have a leaky gut, though, they could be treated for just a month and then tested again - at which point healthcare workers would already know whether their treatment was working or whether they needed to find a different or additional intervention. We know that hundreds of millions of children around the world are stunted and that many, perhaps most, have a leaky gut. We believe the leaky gut causes the stunting. What we don't fully understand is how to diagnose a leaky gut, treat it, or reverse its effects. The fluorophore-based test for leaky gut is only a beginning - but by putting us in a position to learn a lot more, a lot more accurately, about what's going on in children's guts, it could get us a lot closer to solving the problem.

Diagnosing Leaky Gut

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Your average doctor goes through four intense years of medical school and then somewhere between three and five years of grueling residency to become an expert at diagnosing and treating illness. When she puts the stethoscope to your chest, listens to you cough, and tells you what's making you sick, she's basing her diagnosis on at least a decade of experience and training. And, as Dr. Udantha Abeyratne at Australia's University of Queensland is discovering, your cell phone is getting closer and closer to being able to do just as good a job. One disease that's particularly hard for human doctors to diagnose is pneumonia; even highly trained specialists looking at X-ray images can disagree about whether it's pneumonia or something else that's making a patient cough. For community healthcare workers in poor countries who lack advanced training and expensive equipment, accurately diagnosing pneumonia can be impossible - but it's one of the common reasons kids come to them with a cough. In fact, the World Health Organization guidelines suggest that if children come in complaining of a cough and are taking more than a certain number of breaths a minute, healthcare workers should just go ahead and treat them for pneumonia. It's an understandable precaution; a million kids die every year of pneumonia. For children who actually have pneumonia, this is great; they get the medicine they need quickly. But for clinics using the WHO guidelines, as many as 80% of the kids diagnosed with pneumonia actually have other diseases that cause coughing and quick breathing, including (but not limited to) malaria, asthma, diphtheria, and tuberculosis. A kid with one of those diseases who gets treated for pneumonia isn't just being treated for a disease she doesn't have; she's also not being treated for a disease she does have - and she'll continue to get sicker until somebody realizes what's going on. Not only that, but taking antibiotics for a disease you don't have helps bacteria grow more resistant to those antibiotics. Approximately 700,000 people already die from antibiotic-resistant infections every year - and by 2050, the annual death toll could be as high as 10 million. Dr. Abeyratne is not an expert in pneumonia; he's an expert in medical instrumentation and diagnostic technologies, especially those based on acoustical analysis, and for many years he's been working on diagnosing sleep apnea. He knew that a regular snore and a snore caused by sleep apnea sound very slightly different - different enough that he had developed a tool that a computer could use to diagnose sleep apnea by analyzing the sound of snoring. When he learned about the challenges diagnosing pneumonia presented, he wondered: could a computer tell the difference between a pneumonia cough and other kinds of coughs? In 2009, when we issued a Grand Challenges Explorations call for proposals to develop inexpensive diagnostics for priority health conditions, with a specific need for ideas that included complex signature analysis for pneumonia using respiratory acoustics, he came to us with a hypothesis that it could. He won the grant, along with 39 others from a total of 8 countries, and got to work. Partnering with a hospital in Indonesia, he collected recordings of the coughs of 160 kids with pneumonia, bronchiolitis, bronchitis, asthma, and other respiratory diseases. When he analyzed the audio with a computer algorithm he developed with his team, he found that pneumonia coughs and non-pneumonia coughs do sound different: In pneumonia, tiny air sacs in the lung are filled with fluids, and that causes certain changes to your coughing. Meanwhile, in asthma, for example, often diagnosed in remote regions as pneumonia, tiny airways in the lungs constrict, which causes different changes to your coughing. The difference between the two kinds of cough is subtle enough that only very well-trained human ears can perceive it, but it's easier for a computer to detect. Once Dr. Abeyratne's grant at the foundation was finished in 2011, the University of Queensland stepped in with support, and he continued to refine his algorithm until it diagnosed pneumonia much more accurately than someone using just the WHO guidelines. With the support of hospitals in Western Australia, he and his team expanded the algorithm so that it could diagnose not just pneumonia but also bronchiolitis, asthma, croup, COPD, and other respiratory diseases. They then created a smartphone-based diagnostic test, ResApp, which recently received regulatory approval for the European Union; a US FDA application is pending. As time goes on, it seems like there are more and more mobile phone apps designed to do completely unnecessary things. Nobody needs an easier way to put cat ears on their digital photos. But alongside the useless apps, there are some that are incredibly important. Thanks in part to Dr. Abeyratne's work, someday soon this could include apps for making sure that kids in places that lack experienced doctors get treated for the right illness.

Diagnosing Pneumonia

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Chances are that, when you were a kid, you picked a dandelion or two and blew on it, watching its seeds helicopter gracefully through the air, headed for fields, lawns, and gardens. Your neighbors probably didn't appreciate the help you gave the pesky weed, but the dandelion is mostly harmless. Other weeds are more dangerous - much more dangerous. The striga weed, for example, damages or completely destroys the crops that millions of small farmers around the world depend on to feed their families and make a living. Dr. Travis Bayer, founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sound Agriculture, is helping those farmers rid their fields of striga - and double their crop yields in the process. Since plants can't solve their problems by running away, they've learned to be master communicators instead. Any time they need support, they send out different types of chemical signals into the soil and even into the air. One way they get nutrients from the soil, for instance, is by sending out chemical compounds called strigolactones; microbes in the soil respond to these signals in ways that help plants grow. Unfortunately, helpful collaborators in the soil aren't the only ones paying attention. Lying dormant in the soil of a lot of farms south of the Sahara is a parasitic plant called striga, also known as Witchweed ("striga" is Latin for "witch"). And once striga has sensed the presence of strigolactones nearby, it starts to drill into the roots of a plant and suck out the water and nutrients the soil community is giving the plant. After 6 or 8 weeks of doing this, the striga blooms into a beautiful purple flower - one that contains thousands of striga seeds. Which means that a few striga plants contain within themselves enough seeds to overrun an entire field with their offspring. And that's exactly what happens. A striga infestation reduces crop yields by anywhere from 30 to 100 percent - complete crop loss. And it stays around: a field overrun with striga one year will be overrun the next year, and the year after that. In fact, much of the time, the only solution small farmers have is to move. Dr. Bayer was a biochemist at a British university, and he had no particular interest in agriculture. But when a postdoc in his lab who had grown up on a small farm in Zimbabwe started talking about Witchweed and its ruinous consequences, he started wondering whether it was possible to trick striga into thinking that crops had started growing when in fact they hadn't even been planted yet. With a Grand Challenges Explorations  grant to protect crop plants from farm to market, he got to work in 2012 developing a strain of yeast that produced strigolactones. Once he had the compound, he conducted field trials in Kenya and Uganda, where, by spraying fields a week before crops were due to be planted, he could send a false signal to the dormant striga weeds that it was time to wake up and rob growing plants of their nutrients. So the striga woke up, went in search of the strigolactone-producing roots, didn't find any…and then, because striga can't survive without a host, it died. The field trials showed that this process, which goes by the slightly morbid name of "suicidal germination," killed between 95 and 97 percent of the striga weed, with the result that farmers' harvest yield doubled. The success of the grant gave Dr. Bayer the confidence to leave academia entirely and work full-time at the company he founded, Sound Agriculture. Since regulatory systems in poor countries tend to lack the resources it would take to test everything submitted to them, they tend to depend on U.S. and international systems, so Dr. Bayer is working to get the compound approved in the U.S. first before bringing it to small farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. In the meantime, in working with U.S. farmers, he's discovered that the spray doesn't just eliminate striga; the strigolactones it produces, by attracting more nutrients from the soil, also increase hardiness and drought tolerance in crops even when there was no striga in a field to begin with. Tricking a plant called Witchweed into killing itself might sound like a grisly endeavor. But in fact it could help millions of small farmers around the world bring fields they thought were dead back to new, thriving life.

Eliminating Witchweed

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Blog posts highlighting the first 10 years of Grand Challenges Explorations

Grand Challenges Explorations Retrospective (2008-2018)

Introduction (GCGH: 2005-2015)

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Publications

GCGH Project Retrospectives Intro Chapter

Grand Challenges in Global Health retrospective (2005-2015)

Antigen Design (Hill)

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Antigen Design (Kappe)

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Biological Vector Control (Burt)

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Book chapters highlighting the first 10 years of the original Grand Challenges initiative

Grand Challenges in Global Health Retrospective (2005-2015)

Grand Challenges Spotlight Talk IV: Zoleka Ngcete (Program Manager, Grand Challenges South Africa, South African Medical Research Council)

Grand Challenges Spotlight Talk IV: Zoleka Ngcete (Program Manager, Grand Challenges South Africa, South African Medical Research Council)

Grand Challenges Spotlight Talk IV: Zoleka Ngcete

Project Videos

Grand Challenges Spotlight Talk II: Moses Alobo (Program Manager, Grand Challenges Africa, The African Academy of Sciences)

Grand Challenges Spotlight Talk II: Moses Alobo (Program Manager, Grand Challenges Africa, The African Academy of Sciences)

Grand Challenges Spotlight Talk II: Moses Alobo

Tribute to Steve Buchsbaum, outgoing Deputy Director, Global Partnerships &amp; Grand Challenges, Discovery &amp; Translational Sciences, Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation.

Tribute to Steve Buchsbaum, outgoing Deputy Director, Global Partnerships &amp; Grand Challenges, Discovery &amp; Translational Sciences, Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation.

Grand Challenges Annual Meeting: Tribute to Steve Buchsbaum

Grand Challenges Spotlight Talk V: Clair Reid (Chief Impact Officer and Founder, Reel Gardening)

Grand Challenges Spotlight Talk V: Clair Reid (Chief Impact Officer and Founder, Reel Gardening)

Grand Challenges Spotlight Talk V: Claire Reid

Grand Challenges for Development

On December 10, 2020, Grand Challenges Explorations (Round 25) and Grand Challenges grants were announced for 15 researchers from 6 different countries around the world.

On December 10, 2020, Grand Challenges Explorations (Round 25) and Grand Challenges grants were announced for 15 researchers from 6 different countries around the world.

Grand Challenges Initiatives Highlights - December 2020

Leo Han of Oregon Health and Science University in the U.S. and colleagues at the University of North Carolina and the Marsico Lung Institute will build a hydration-based drug discovery platform for the cervix to screen drug libraries for long-lasting non-hormonal contraceptives that alter mucus hydration.

Contraceptive Discovery

Photo Gallery

Mark Adams of Population Services International in the U.S. will develop a "Digital Gateway" that provides health campaign managers easy access to a range of datasets to improve the planning and performance, and lower the cost, of health campaigns.

Health Campaigns

Soo Downe of the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom will develop a multi-media program for lawyers and judges who work on medical litigation related to childbirth to help ensure that they understand the evidence on risks and benefits of the procedure as well as legal rights of patients.

Cesarean Section

Jeffrey Lee of the University of Toronto in Canada will engineer single-domain camelid antibodies (nanobodies) to block the interaction between two proteins exclusive to the sperm and egg that mediate their fusion and thereby fertilization, as affordable, non-hormonal contraceptives with fewer side effects.

Anna Winters of Akros Inc. in the U.S. will adapt an existing web-based mapping tool currently in use in several low-middle income countries that guides and maps the progress of health-related campaigns, to incorporate human movement and thereby improve campaign coverage.

Darryl Russell of the University of Adelaide in Australia will use genomics approaches to identify the molecular pathways that control ovulation for developing more non-hormonal contraceptives with fewer side effects.

Jody Lori of the University of Michigan in the U.S. will implement a WhatsApp platform for medical staff and community health workers in rural areas in Liberia to communicate with staff at larger hospitals to accelerate the referral and treatment of obstetric emergencies.

On May 20, 2020, Grand Challenges Explorations grants were announced for 11 researchers from 3 different countries around the world. Each will receive US$100,000 to conduct early-stage research projects focusing on one global health and development challenge selected for this Round.

On May 20, 2020, Grand Challenges Explorations grants were announced for 11 researchers from 3 different countries around the world. Each will receive US$100,000 to conduct early-stage research projects focusing on one global health and development challenge selected for this Round.

Grand Challenges Explorations Round 24 Highlights

Hannah Wild of Stanford University in the U.S. will develop a modelling-based approach that uses remote sensing and geospatial analysis to include neglected and high-risk nomadic populations in health databases and for campaign planning.

Coite Manuel of Food Chain LLC in the U.S. will develop a web-based tool that takes existing road network and population data for any country, divides it into regions, and identifies the closest health facility based on type and time of travel to improve health campaign planning and better monitor population health.

Robert Miros of 3rd Stone Design, Inc. in the U.S. will adapt their portable vaccine refrigerator, which is battery powered and can be monitored remotely, to maximize the charge life so that it can support vaccination campaigns in low- and middle-income countries.

Mosokah Fallah of the National Public Health Institute of Liberia will provide health campaign staff with activity tracking devices and movement-based bonuses to encourage more accurate reporting of coverage to improve impact.

Qingfeng Li of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the U.S. will develop a computational simulation tool to optimize the design of health campaigns in low-income settings.

Laura Smith of Research Foundation for the State University of New York in the U.S. will develop a decision-making tool that can plan more effective health campaigns in low- and middle-income countries by considering any competing interests of stakeholders.

Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University in the U.S. will develop a computational tool to support health campaigns in low- and middle-income countries that can predict the number and location of the people that need targeting.

David Hammel of Balcony Labs Inc. in the U.S. together with their partner Direct-Relief will develop a communication tool that combines smartphone messaging with geographical information systems to enable health campaign managers to communicate directly with health workers and civilians in a specific region of interest to improve the impact of their campaigns.

On December 4, 2019, Grand Challenges Explorations grants were announced for 29 researchers from 12 different countries around the world. Each will receive US$100,000 to conduct early-stage research projects focusing on one of three global health and development challenges selected for this Round.

On December 4, 2019, Grand Challenges Explorations grants were announced for 29 researchers from 12 different countries around the world. Each will receive US$100,000 to conduct early-stage research projects focusing on one of three global health and development challenges selected for this Round.

Grand Challenges Explorations Round 23 Highlights

Marnie Winter of the University of South Australia, together with Tina Bianco-Miotto, Claire Roberts, and Clare Whitehead of the University of Adelaide in Australia and the University of Toronto in Canada, will develop and test short-interfering RNAs (siRNA) high-density lipoprotein (HDL) nanocarriers for the treatment of preeclampsia.

Emerging Technologies

Andrew Jackson of the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom will determine whether the amoeba, Acanthamoeba, which is commonly found in water and soil, acts as a host for Salmonella Typhi bacteria, which cause typhoid fever, to support growth and disease spread in Malawi.

Salmonella Typhi

Anita Shet of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the U.S. will seek to increase childhood vaccination coverage in India and Nigeria by identifying opportunities for catch-up vaccinations when under-vaccinated children are hospitalized.

Immunization Demand

Fredos Okumu of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania will develop technology to evaluate mosquito control interventions using a combination of artificial intelligence, infrared spectroscopy, and entomology.

Gemma Langridge of Quadram Institute Bioscience in the United Kingdom, along with co-investigators Aaron Jenkins of the University of Sydney in Australia and France Daigle of the University of Montreal in Canada, will collect different isolates of S. Typhi, which causes typhoid fever, to analyze genomic structure, growth, and gene expression to better understand how it can survive at low levels in water, and determine how it can be reactivated for monitoring.

Andrew Seal of the Institute for Global Health and Development in the United Kingdom will test whether traditional female social groups in Somalia can adopt a participatory learning and action (PLA) approach to improve vaccine knowledge and coverage in humanitarian settings.

Windy Tanner and Jim VanDerslice of the University of Utah in the U.S., together with colleagues from Mehran University of Engineering and Technology in Pakistan, will analyze water samples to determine the conditions that promote the survival of the typhoid fever causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi, and they will use metagenomic deconvolution to identify any gene exchange from other microbial species that may produce drug-resistant strains.

Olukemi Amodu, Mofeyisara Omobowale and Folakemi Amodu of the University of Ibadan College of Medicine in Nigeria will develop a three-part intervention to provide more convenient and accessible vaccinations for children of working mothers to increase the timeliness and completion of childhood vaccinations.

Andrew Greenhill of Federation University Australia in Australia, along with partners at the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research, will use advanced environmental microbiology methods to study microbial community dynamics associated with survival of the typhoid fever-causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi in aquatic environments in Papua New Guinea.

Itoro Ata of the Solina Center for International Development and Research in Nigeria will implement a program to support unemployed mothers in Nigeria by linking education on the importance of vaccinations with vocational skills education and training to improve immunization coverage.

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

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.

Pathogen Identification

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.

Microbial Biotherapeutics

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.

Crop Disease Surveillance

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.

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.

Agricultural Policies

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.

Water Sanitation Hygiene

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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