WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Saying that medical science has solved the "easy" problems of the rich world, Microsoft founder Bill Gates Sunday announced a $200 million fund aimed at luring researchers into finding original cures for the poor world's ailments.
The $200 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be used to set up the "Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative" which will dole out money in grants of up to $20 million each to scientists around the world.
"By accelerating research to overcome scientific obstacles in AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, millions of lives could be saved," Gates told reporters in a telephone interview.
"Of the, say, 1,500 new medicines that have been approved in the last 25 years, only 20 of those have related to the diseases of the developing countries," added Gates, who was to announce the new fund at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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News source: CNN
The $200 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be used to set up the "Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative" which will dole out money in grants of up to $20 million each to scientists around the world.
"By accelerating research to overcome scientific obstacles in AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, millions of lives could be saved," Gates told reporters in a telephone interview.
"Of the, say, 1,500 new medicines that have been approved in the last 25 years, only 20 of those have related to the diseases of the developing countries," added Gates, who was to announce the new fund at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
View: Full Story News source: CNN"Rich world diseases we've gotten. All the easy ones have been done ... If you look at the focus of the research activity, it's either focused specifically on rich world diseases or it's at a basic level that doesn't directly apply to those problems."
According to the Global Forum on Health Research, only 10 percent of medical research centers on the diseases that cause 90 percent of the health burden in the world.
The program will be administered by the U.S. National Institutes of Health Foundation and the new fund is heavy on big names in U.S. science. It will be headed by Dr. Harold Varmus, a former NIH director who is now President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Current NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni is also going to help decide who gets the grants, as will Dr. Richard Klausner, former head of the National Cancer Institute who is now Executive Director of the Global Health Program at Gates Foundation.
The board will also include Francis Nkrumah, Director of the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research at the University of Ghana and leading British scientists.
Research follows money
Scientists often say that research follows the money -- researchers tend to choose fields they know are well-funded.
Klausner said the new fund will act as a carrot to lure researchers into less sexy projects. As with most medical research, the scientists will have to propose the idea and present it to the fund, which will then decide whether to issue the grant.
The first job will be to make a list of the kind of things the fund will seek to encourage research in.
Some possibilities include finding new ways to protect children from diarrhea and respiratory infections, which kill millions every year, and finding better ways to nourish children, providing key vitamins that millions now lack.
"Is there an Achilles' heel for latent tuberculosis?" asked Klausner. "Using the new genomes, can we figure out novel approaches for making mosquitoes inhospitable for malaria and other diseases? Then this fund will be used to move the science and technology community."
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