Bill & Melinda Gates - Grand Challenges China - New Interventions for Global Health 

Scope

Under this new Grand Challenge we seek original, transformative, and innovative concepts for vaccines and therapeutics to ameliorate the acquisition, progression, or transmission of infectious diseases that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest citizens. To this end, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Gates Foundation) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) will support up to six research programs that involve collaborations between investigators in Chinese-based institutions and those in institutions based in other countries. These grants will be for four years and up to US$1M, with the Gates Foundation funding and managing the non-Chinese portion of the collaborations, and the NSFC funding and managing the Chinese portion of the collaborations.

Target Diseases and Pathogens This RFP is focused on identifying new interventions in a small set of diseases of relevance to global health, considering strategic alignment with other funders and current investments within the NSFC and the Gates Foundation. Consequently, only proposals addressing these specific indications will be considered.

Vaccines

What we are looking for The goal of this challenge is to solicit novel concepts and candidates for vaccines that can serve as transformative tools in the efforts to prevent, control or eliminate diseases of our interest. We are particularly interested in approaches to induce unnatural immunity to pathogens to achieve long-lasting immunity across multiple strains, species and/or sub-species, utilizing recent advances made in structural biology, bioinformatics and molecular immunology. Our ultimate goal is to enable a path to move the best vaccine concepts and candidates into clinical development. The scope of vaccine concepts could include ideas specific to the subset of global health pathogens described below, or broad, paradigm-shifting concepts in vaccinology, should they also have potential applicability to those specific pathogens.

Target pathogens:

• Human immunodeficiency virus – only approaches that aimed at providing sustained protection will be considered

• Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Therapeutics:

What we are looking for: With this topic we also seek to explore new therapeutic options to treat infectious diseases and other conditions that disproportionately burden those living in low-resource settings. We are particularly interested in approaches that would target specific pathogen populations that are either bottlenecks in the pathogen’s life-cycle or that are significant contributors to disease or transmission, but may be difficult to treat with current agents. Areas of focus include: exploiting novel sources of chemical diversity not typically found in conventional small molecule libraries, including novel chemical approaches to the manipulation and optimization of complex molecules and natural products; development and prosecution of screening approaches that target pathogens in a realistic environment; and taking advantage of recent scientific and technical advances for target identification, validation, and deconvolution.

Target Diseases:

• Tuberculosis

o New agents or approaches with the potential for shortening treatment duration

• Malaria

o Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax

o Liver-stage and gametocyte-active agents, and multi-stage active compounds

• Diarrheal Disease in infants caused by:

o Cryptosporidium hominis

o Cryptosporidium parvum

 Are diagnostic interventions, accepted in this Grand Challenge? No. We are specifically focusing on therapeutic and vaccine development in this Grand Challenge.

 Application deadline for Letter of Intent (LOI) is March 15, 2016, 8:00 am Beijing time (March 14, 2016 - 5pm Seattle time – 9am UK GMT)

 Link to further information