Dear CBPR colleagues,

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today that beginning March
31, 2008, it will accept grant proposals for the first funding round of
Grand Challenges Explorations, a new $100 million initiative to help
scientists across the globe pursue ideas that have never before been
tested for solving major health problems. The four topics for the first
funding round were also announced.

Initial grants through the Explorations initiative will be $100,000 each,
and projects showing success will have the opportunity to receive
additional funding of $1 million or more. The initiative will use an
agile, accelerated grant-making process--applications will be two pages,
and preliminary data are not required. The foundation will select and
award grants within approximately three months from the proposal submission
deadline of May 30, 2008.

"Breakthrough ideas can come from anywhere, and we hope this new process
will encourage a broad range of scientists from around the world to bring
their ideas to the table," said Dr. Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates
Foundation's Global Health Program.  "We're especially interested in
reaching people who work outside the field of global health, innovators
in the developing world, and young investigators."

Grand Challenges Explorations is an expansion of the Grand Challenges in
Global Health initiative, which was launched in 2003 to spur the
discovery of new technologies to improve global health. The Explorations
initiative focuses on research areas where creative, unorthodox thinking
is most urgently needed.

Topics for First Funding Round

The first funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations will consider
proposals in four topic areas:

* Creating new ways to protect against infectious diseases: Untried or
unproven approaches to protect against infectious diseases, including
harnessing natural or synthetic immune responses, or eliminating the need
for an effective immune response.

* Creating drugs or delivery systems that limit the emergence of
resistance: Innovative ideas for discovering or delivering drugs that are
less likely to lose effectiveness because of resistance developing in the
disease-causing agent.

* Creating new ways to prevent or cure HIV infection: Innovative ideas
for HIV prevention or treatment methods that fall outside current
research on vaccines, antiretroviral drugs, and other biomedical and
behavior-change strategies.

* Exploring the basis for latency in TB: Unconventional approaches to
understanding latent TB infection, with the goal of discovering new ways
to identify and eliminate latent infection, and break the cycle of TB
transmission.

Grant proposals for the first Explorations funding round will be accepted
online at www.gcgh.org/explorations from March 31 through May 30, 2008;
applicants must register intent to submit a proposal by May 15, 2008.

Once the first Explorations funding round is complete, the foundation
will announce subsequent funding rounds. Topics may vary over time, to
cover a range of priorities in global health research.

Full descriptions of the initial topic areas and application instructions
are available at www.gcgh.org/explorations.

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