Does a woman with high stress levels run the risk of giving birth to a premature baby? That’s the risk profile that Arindam Maitra and his team will try and predict as part of their project under the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s (BMGF) Grand Challenges Initiative.
“The aim is to develop clinical tools to assess maternal stress and the risk of pre-term births, which can lead to complex diseases and is one of the biggest causes of infant deaths,” says Maitra, speaking from the Grand Challenges (GC) annual meet in Beijing this month.
Looking for nimble-footed solutions to universal problems, the Grand Challenges initiative was founded over 10 years ago by the BMGF. Or, as Bill Gates explained in his “Saving lives through crazy ideas” blog last year, the Challenge was launched with the goal of “identifying the biggest problems in health and giving grants to researchers who might solve them.”
Seven projects were selected for a grant from over 150 submissions in India to tackle child mortality and development, as part of the challenge “All children thriving”. The maternal stress and pre-term risk project led by Maitra from West Bengal’s National Institute of Biomedical Genomics is one of them.
“We can do much more from what we have,” says Renu Swarup, MD of Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), reflecting on the response to the initiative and the challenges that remain.
Grand Challenges is an umbrella term for competitive innovation aimed at tackling a national problem, she says, and researchers need to be encouraged to participate more in such initiatives. Nevertheless, she says, proposals from the earlier challenges are poised for a further scale-up in terms of enterprises taking the innovations forward. The earlier challenges aimed to improve healthy growth through agriculture and nutrition besides encouraging efforts to reinvent the toilet.
In India, Grand Challenges is conducted by the BMGF along with BIRAC (a Government enterprise) and the Department of Biotechnology. Now in its third year, the “All children thriving” challenge is in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The projects are given seed grants of $500,000 for two years and full grants of $2.5 million for up to four years.
The challenge looks for a combination of things that are required to set a child up for a healthy life, says BMGF’s Steven Buchsbaum. About 40 projects have been finalized this year between South Africa, Brazil and India, among others, he adds.
Against the backdrop of a global economy under pressure, Swarup concedes that there always is the worry of funds drying up for research. But then again, she adds, investors are looking at technology innovations beyond just IT and extending it to applied research and at smaller levels.
Ecosystem challengeThe aim is to help provide an innovative ecosystem where funding is provided and researchers are connected to the right technology resource groups, she says. “In fact, though the situation is changing, the biggest challenge is to provide an innovative ecosystem,” adds Swarup.
Bill Gates’s anniversary blog is just as candid on the pace and outcomes of the challenge. “To be honest, we’re not as far along as I hoped a decade ago; the process of developing and perfecting new tools — going from proof-of-concept through clinical trials, regulatory approval, manufacturing, and distribution—is even slower and harder than I thought. But we’ve learned a lot, and we’ve made some promising progress,” says Gates of the challenges that remain.