Gates Foundation picks 14 grand challenges for global disease research.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced the first 14 targets of a US$ 200 million programme on global disease research, on 17 October. The " Grand Challenges in Global Health " initiative, launched by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2003, is intended to encourage innovations in science and technology in order to remove some of the obstacles to more rapid progress against the burden of disease carried by the developing world. The mostly biomedical list was created with advice from 1048 scientists in 75 countries and following the deliberations of a 20-member, 13-country Scientific Board. Ten of the 14 challenges concern infectious diseases, including six — nearly half the total — relating to vaccines. " Our goal was twofold, " said Richard Klausner, Executive Director of the Global Health Program of the Gates Foundation. " Firstly, to use the whole concept of grand challenges to force ourselves to articulate the world's health problems and to stimulate excitement to work on problems that will have an impact on the world's poor. Secondly, to solve those problems and fund those solutions. " He also explained that " grand challenges are not the same as grand problems. We need to distinguish between the two. AIDS is a problem but it is not a grand challenge. Finding an AIDS vaccine is not even a grand challenge. But solving the bottleneck that prevents the creation of an AIDS vaccination is a grand challenge. It's about finding critical pathways through the problems. Many proposed problems did not make it onto the Grand Challenges list because they could not be turned into critical pathways. " Board member, Professor Roy Anderson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College, London, welcomed the focus on vaccines. " The lack of vaccines is the stumbling block for most major international health problems. And the paucity News of our immunological understanding is really quite gross in some areas, especially for the antigenically varying organisms. " The list also includes two substantial health assessment issues: to " develop technologies that permit quantitative assessment of population health status " and to " develop technologies that allow assessment of individuals for multiple conditions or pathogens at point-of-care. " One of the key problems for governments is to know what their populations are suffering from, so that they can rank diseases for intervention, said Anderson. " Only a quarter of …