Grand Challenges - Novel Approaches to Characterizing and Tracking the Global Burden of Antimicrobial Resistance

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are soliciting innovative ideas for models, tools, analytics, surveillance platforms, technologies, and other high impact approaches to generating evidence about the burden and impact of antimicrobial resistance in low and middle income settings, and improving its translation into practice. We are particularly seeking transformative and innovative approaches which identify and fill knowledge and practice gaps currently limiting progress in AMR surveillance and epidemiology.


A few examples of work that would be considered for funding:

• Proposals that quantify the contribution of various drivers and/or interventions on the global emergence and spread of AMR.
• Novel metrics and analytic approaches (e.g. using previously unappreciated data/sources or new analytical methods) to provide a more complete picture of the scale, impact, or dynamics of global AMR.
• Integrated approaches to understanding and describing the association between resistance patterns, anti-microbial use, access, and health and economic burden.
• Proposals focused on creating novel high-level, scalable systems architecture (e.g. data sources and streams) and activities necessary to transform global AMR epidemiology.
• Proposals that provide a detailed analysis of the economic and health systems impacts of AMR.
• Non-incremental innovative technology and surveillance platforms capable of accelerating the generation of robust evidence to document and track the burden of AMR. To be relevant to this call, the proposal should be scalable to a large number of contexts and/or provide generalizable insights.
• Methods to improve surveillance capacity and reporting of AMR beyond enhanced routine surveillance and targeted surveys (e.g. the application of genomics and machine learning)

The Details

Deadline - 11 May 2016

Full details - http://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/challenge/novel-approaches-characterizing-and-tracking-global-burden-antimicrobial-resistance-0

FAQs - http://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/grant-opportunities/faq/gce

Grand Challenges- Design New Analytics Approaches for Malaria Elimination

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are looking for proposals of innovative solutions for improving data availability and use in decision-making for malaria elimination that focus on ONE of the following areas - 

• Innovation in interoperability
• Innovation in analytics 

Winning proposals should:

• Focus on simplicity of methods using routinely available data
• Explain rationale for targeting specific countries or regions
• Describe approach for interoperability with country data systems including DHIS2
• Provide evidence that the activity is aligned to relevant national strategies on eHealth
• State the expected improvements over existing solutions, including streamlining of communications and reporting burden
• Address cost of the solution and a description of how it can be brought to scale and be sustainable in the malaria-endemic developing world context, including any computing resources
• Explain online and offline capabilities and limitations
• Explain how ease of use will be measured – i.e. back end analytics that show improvement in timeliness of data collection to analysis, and from analysis to decision-making
• Include user performance metrics (i.e. completeness and timeliness of analysis conducted with the information available)
• Explain how the solution will be strengthening existing health systems instead of building a parallel system
• If the solution involves building on or integrating a reporting system for additional disease areas, explain how it will strengthen malaria elimination decision-making
• Explain how the solution will improve key malaria elimination indicators
• If a proposal recommends new data be collected, it must provide details on what information will become routine surveillance data and what is expected to be uniquely collected for the analysis

The Details 

Deadline: 11 MAY 2016

Full Details :  http://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/challenge/design-new-analytics-approaches-malaria-elimination-round-17

FAQs - http://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/grant-opportunities/faq/gce

The Gates Vaccine Innovation Award

The Gates Foundation invites you to nominate individuals or a group of individuals who have achieved significant improvements in the prevention, control, or elimination of vaccine-preventable diseases through immunization.  Nominees will be assessed on three broad criteria:

• Impact – The nominee should have achieved significant improvements in the prevention, control, or elimination of vaccine-preventable disease.
• Innovation and creativity – The nominee should have applied imaginative and pioneering approaches to overcome difficult challenges to immunizing children and achieving impact.
• Scale – The nominee’s innovation should be at scale or suitable to be implemented at scale within the nominee’s country and around the world.

For more information, please see: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/vaccines/Pages/vaccine-innovation-award.aspx

This award is focused ONLY on programs and policies associated with achieving impact through the delivery of vaccines.

The award winner will be recognized with $250,000 (U.S.) and personally acknowledged by Gates Foundation leadership.

Nominations will be accepted through 11:30 AM Pacific Standard Time on November 17, 2011.

Gates Foundation: Grand Challenges Exploration Round #8

The Gates Foundation released the topics for its newest call for applications:
http://www.grandchallenges.org/Explorations/Pages/TopicsOverview.aspx
There are 5 topics, although 2 are particularly interesting for TropMed:


1.)Design New Approaches to Optimize Immunization Systems
This topic aims to generate novel approaches to optimizing the performance of immunization logistics and supply systems in low-resource settings. Applicants are encouraged to re-examine the systems trusted with delivering vaccines and design innovative solutions to optimize the performance of these systems, both today and in the future. We seek proposals that are responsive to the topic that are daring in premise and clearly different from the approaches currently under investigation or employed. The solutions submitted to this topic must be focused on the operational aspects of immunization systems in countries, and must have the potential to be scaled up or reproduced in multiple settings.
http://www.grandchallenges.org/ImproveVaccines/Topics/Pages/OptimizeImmunizationSystemsRound8.aspx


2.) Explore Nutrition for Healthy Growth of Infants and Children
The goal of this topic is to solicit new scientific understanding and new science-based preventative and therapeutic approaches to improve nutrition and promote the healthy growth and development of infants and young children. We strongly encourage investigating the mechanisms of action of nutritional deficiencies and interventions, since this will provide the basis for new strategies to promote healthy growth and will facilitate developing tests to measure nutritional status and to measure treatment outcomes, including discriminating responders from non-responders in population studies.
http://www.grandchallenges.org/ImproveNutrition/Topics/Pages/NutritionforInfantsandChildrenRound8.aspx

The deadline for all responses to the Grand Challenges Exploration Round #8 are 17 November 2011.

Gates Foundation: Open Letters of Inquiry

The Gates Foundation regularly accepts Letters of Inquiry (LOI) that propose projects that investigate malaria, nutrition, and/or neglected diseases. Some of the things they will consider:

• Improve diagnostics so that diseases can be detected early.
• Develop vaccines and drug treatments that are safe, effective, and affordable.
• Control the source of the disease.
• Attempt to eliminate or eradicate some diseases entirely.
• Advocate for public support to address these neglected diseases.

Please see the following link for more details:

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/grantseeker/Pages/grant-opportunities.aspx

Grant budgets are open-ended (but must be reasonable) and there is no specific deadline.