The Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative

In January 2003 an initiative was announced by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund research on diseases that disproportionately affect people in the developing world. The initiative takes as its model the grand challenges formulated more than 100 years ago by mathematician David Hilbert – a list of important unsolved mathematical problems that has encouraged innovative mathematics research ever since. Similarly, the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative aims to engage creative minds from diverse scientific disciplines to work on 14 major challenges. The challenges range from creating new vaccines to developing accurate methods for measuring health status.

www.gcgh.org

Our Grand Challenge

One of the 14 Grand Challenges is to develop new approaches to control insects that transmit diseases to humans. Insects spread many serious diseases such as malaria, which affects 350-500 million people and causes more than one million deaths annually, primarily among young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly, dengue fever infects up to 100 million people each year, and can cause fever, hemorrhaging, and death in severe cases.

A competitive granting process was established and in June 2005 it was announced that 43 projects would receive a total of US$440 million in funding for the next five years to attempt to solve these global health problems. Our project was one of them

Our challenge and our research program is focused on identifying a way to eliminate dengue transmission.

Since the formal start of this research program we have established relationships with other funding bodies that are supporting our research program. These include the National Health and Medical Research Council of the Australia government and the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health at the University of Toronto.