Three Colorado research teams received nearly $24 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for vaccine research to prevent or treat diseases that kill more than 1 million people a year.
The Gates Foundation and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health on Monday announced 43 grants totaling $436.6 million under the “Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative” to treat and prevent common diseases such as malaria, HIV and tuberculosis.
The competition, announced by Gates two years ago, attracted 1,500 proposals from 70 countries.
The projects are “very visionary and very, very high-risk,” said Dr. Richard D. Klausner, a former director of the National Cancer Institute who now runs the Gates Foundation’s global health program. “But if any of them are successful, it will be well worth the investment.”
Chemist Bob Sievers at the University of Colorado at Boulder received the third-largest award: $19.5 million for work on a powdery measles vaccine.
Measles kills almost 1 million people each year, mostly children in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization.
Sievers said his dry vaccine would not need constant and costly refrigeration and could be inhaled, requiring no syringe.
An English team received $20 million to develop a new treatment for tuberculosis, and a group from England and South Africa got $19.7 million for a vaccine-releasing device to prevent HIV infection in women.
Other Gates grant recipients from Colorado are Robert Garcea of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, and Marazban Sarkari of RxKinetix Inc. in Louisville.
Robert Garcea received $3.5 million for a treatment for human papillomavirus, which causes nearly 500,000 cases of cervical cancer every year.
Sarkari was granted $789,000 for exploring ways to make vaccines stable in a wide variety of temperatures.
“I believe we can transform health in the developing world,” Bill Gates said.
Among the other potentially significant ideas from around the world:
An international team headed by Scott Leslie O’Neill of the University of Queensland in Australia will get $6.7 million to introduce a bacterial parasite to a mosquito population in a laboratory; the parasite, which occurs naturally in other insects, should cause the mosquitoes to die before they are old enough to transmit dengue fever, which infects up to 100 million people every year.
Four grants totaling $47 million are being given to researchers fighting malnutrition by genetically altering the nutritional content of bananas, cassava, rice and sorghum. Bananas with more vitamins A and E and iron could improve health in Uganda, where 38 percent of children under 5 are stunted from malnourishment.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
