NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

For the past six years the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made Grand Challenges Explorations grants – some for $100,000 for Phase I grants and others for $1 million for Phase II grants – to fund scientific work on unproven ideas that could potentially be groundbreaking in solving major global health and development problems.

Tuesday, the foundation announced the Phase I winners in the 12th round of these innovative grants and three Phase II winners. The winning Phase I grant recipients include 52 projects from 12 countries and fall under five topic areas:

• Inciting Healthy Behaviors: nudge, disrupt, leapfrog, reach

• Novel Enabling Tools and Models Supporting Development of Interventions for Enteric Dysfunction

• Innovations in Feedback & Accountability Systems for Agricultural Development

• The “One Health” Concept: Bringing Together Human and Animal Health for New Solutions

• Develop the Next Generation of Condom

Phase I $100,000 grants were awarded to research ranging from a project to make cows smell like humans to confuse insects that could give them diseases to an air-infused female condom to a touch screen patient feedback system to help reproductive health clinics in Kenya serve their clients better.

Phase II grants are for a second round of funding to take a project even further. The three projects announced Tuesday were awarded additional funding totalling $2.3 million. The first two improve the vaccine cold chain – one from PATH that eliminates the need for vaccine freezing, and another from Nextleaf Analytics to continue work on a remote temperature-monitoring sensor. The third Phase II grant went to Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School for work on fighting neonatal brain injuries.

A full list of GCE projects and grant recipients can be found here. Applications for the next round of Grand Challenges Explorations will be accepted in September 2014. Also, stay tuned for some exciting updates in October on the next phase of Grand Challenges. For email updates with the latest grant opportunities for Grand Challenges in Global Health and for Grand Challenges Explorations, sign up here.

This blog is reprinted with permission from Impatient Optimists.

Steven Buchsbaum is a deputy director for the Discovery and Translational Sciences Team, Global Health Program, at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.