Tamar Kahn
23 October 2008
Cape Town — Two South African scientists have received $100 000 grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's new initiative to support innovative ideas for improving global health.
If their ideas prove successful in the next year, they stand to win up to $1m in further funding from the foundation.
Rather like venture capital seed funding for start-up businesses, the f oundation's Grand Challenges Explorations programme aims to support hundreds of early-stage research projects around the world, many of which are expected to explore ideas that have never before been tested.
"We were hoping this programme would level the playing field so anyone with a transformational idea could more quickly assess its potential for the benefit of global health," the f oundation's president of global health, Tachi Yamada, said yesterday.
Researchers were asked to submit a simple two-page motivation demonstrating how their ideas fell outside current scientific paradigms, and could lead to major advances if successful.
Reviewers were not given any personal details about the applicants, so they could focus on their ideas without being influenced by their credentials or institution's reputation. In the end, 105 grants were awarded.
Anwar Jardine, a researcher in neglected disease at the University of Cape Town, won a grant to pursue potential new drug targets against the bacteria that cause tuberculosis (TB).
Current drugs rely on strategies that interfere with the processes involved in making and maintaining the bacterium's cell wall when the bug is active in the body. Jardine and his colleagues are exploring different targets inside the cell itself, and are focusing on latent TB.
About a third of the world's population is thought to carry dormant TB bacteria, but only 10% of them will ever sicken in their lifetime -- typically after some kind of shock to their immune system.
Experts suggest half the population in SA carries TB: anyone infected with HIV as well faces a one in 10 chance of developing TB each year -- and even if cured, they more readily succumb to a new infection.
New TB drugs are desperately needed, as a growing number of people are infected with drug-resistant strains.
SA's TB epidemic has surged with the country's HIV/AIDS crisis, rising to 337309 new cases and 29787 deaths in 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Figures are sketchy, but the World Health Organisation estimates that about 2% of new TB patients and 7% of those who are repeat patients have drug-resistant strains.
Leonard Damelin, a scientist from the National Health Laboratory Service in SA, will use his grant to try improve the body's natural defence mechanisms.
He will use his grant to boost the infection-fighting ability of the bacteria that naturally line the walls of the vagina and cervix.
Other novel ideas that won support from the foundation include a project that will investigate whether it is possible to turn mosquitoes that normally transmit disease into "flying syringes," so that when they bite humans they deliver vaccines, and an initiative that will create nano-particles to "soak up" viruses in the body.
The f oundation received almost 4000 proposals, from young investigators who had never before received a research grant and those who were much more experienced.
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