A Medical Device Daily

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle) said it is committing $100 million over five years to create a new fast-track grants initiative to support global health research.

According to the Gates Foundation, the goal is to encourage scientists worldwide to explore “creative, unorthodox ideas that could lead to major breakthroughs against some of the greatest health challenges facing poor countries.”

The new initiative, called Grand Challenges Explorations, will support hundreds of early-stage research projects, the foundation said.

“The biggest advances in health often come from unexpected places,” said Tachi Yamada, MD, president of the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. “To effectively tackle diseases like AIDS and malaria, we need to encourage the best and brightest minds to take risks on novel ideas. Not all will bear fruit, but those that do could revolutionize the field of global health.”

Grant applicants will be asked to submit relatively short funding proposals, which will be reviewed on a fast-track schedule, the foundation said. Explorations grants will be about $100,000 each, and successful projects will be eligible for additional funding.

“We want to make it as easy as possible for people with exciting ideas to move their projects forward,” Yamada said.

Explorations grants will be solicited and awarded multiple times a year on a rolling basis, with each funding round addressing a few specific topics or themes. The first call for proposals will be in the first half of 2008, with the first grants expected to be awarded by fall 2008.

The Explorations initiative is an expansion of the Gates Foundation’s commitment to the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, launched in 2003 to accelerate the discovery of new technologies to improve global health (Medical Device Daily, Jan. 29, 2003). To date, the foundation says it has provided $450 million to support more than 40 projects on topics such as making childhood vaccines easier to use in poor countries, and creating new ways to control insects that spread disease.

In other grant news:

• Affymetrix (Santa Clara, California) said it has been awarded a $10.2 million scale-up grant over the next four years from the National Human Research Institute (NHGRI), as part of the expanded ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project. The grant is part of a project involving 16 multinational research centers that totals more than $80 million, the company noted. The goals of the ENCODE project are to identify the various functional regions found across the human genome and to develop new high-throughput technologies associated with this task.

The project at Affymetrix will be led by Thomas Gingeras, PhD, VP for biological science, and will focus on mapping and characterizing all of the human genome regions that are transcribed into RNA, an information molecule vital to a number of biological functions, including protein production. The project title is “Comprehensive Characterization and Classification of the Human Transcriptome.”

According to Affymetrix, the project brings together six other international laboratories, including: University of Geneva (Switzerland), Center for Genomic Regulation (Barcelona, Spain), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (New York), RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center (Yokohama, Japan), University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and the Genome Institute of Singapore. The group will identify protein-coding and non-protein-coding ribonucleic acid (RNA) transcripts using microarrays, high-throughput sequencing, sequenced paired-end ditags and sequenced cap analysis of gene expression tags.

Affymetrix says pharmaceutical, diagnostic and biotechnology companies, as well as academic, government and not-for-profit research institutes, use its technology.

In contracts news:

• ReBuilder Medical Technologies (Charles Town, West Virginia) reported a contract with ETS (Albuquerque, New Mexico) to make an updated version of the ReBuilder system, the professional model 2407. ETS is a contract manufacturer for electronic device companies, including electronic glucose monitors, blood pressure cuffs and microwave ovens containing voice synthesizers to assist visually impaired diabetics.

The ReBuilder system treats peripheral neuropathy, a side effect of diabetes, and has a success rate above 90%, according to the company. The system is also designed for the treatment of restless leg syndrome (RLS), ReBuilder said.

ReBuilder said it also manufactures the Phillips Molluscum treatment system for treating the skin disease Molluscum contagiosum which primarily affects children.

• Baxter International (Deerfield, Illinois) reported that Novation (Irving, Texas), the University HealthSystem Consortium’s (UHC; Oakbrook, Illinois) contracting services company, has signed a new two-year contract extension on behalf of UHC valued at more than $200 million over the contract term. The extension will begin at the end of UHC’s previous multi-year agreement in mid-2008.

The UHC, formed in 1984, is an alliance of 97 academic medical centers and 153 of their affiliated hospitals representing more than 90% of the nation’s non-profit academic medical centers.

Baxter says it assists healthcare professionals and their patients with treatment of complex medical conditions, including hemophilia, immune disorders, cancer, infectious diseases, kidney disease, trauma and other indications.