Innovating for impact: Grand Challenges takes a centuries-old approach to tackling the world’s toughest health problems
By Trevor Mundel
In the early 18th century, the British government issued a challenge, open to anyone: solve the problem of calculating longitude and thereby revolutionize navigation on the open seas. The issue was a critical one at the time due to burgeoning international trade, and a sizable reward was offered to the person or company who discovered a solution. Though seemingly insurmountable, this clear call to action, coupled with an incentive for real breakthroughs, ultimately changed the course of history.
This story has long served as one of my favorite examples of why innovation for innovation’s sake in meaningless, but innovation for impact is powerful beyond compare.
Today the world faces a new set of challenges, and the need for similarly innovative solutions is just as great. Inspired by the story of this centuries-old public-private partnership, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research founded Grand Challenges in 2003.
The premise of the Grand Challenges is simple: Any person or organization, from any sector, can apply for a grant if they have an innovative idea that could lead to breakthrough advances related to complex health challenges. For example, the Grand Challenges Exploration program provides incentives for the best and brightest minds worldwide to find solutions for the most pressing problems facing people in the developing world, offering grants of USD $100,000 to USD $1,000.000 for ground-breaking ideas in global health.
This year the Grand Challenges Conference will be held in the U.K., the home of the fabled Longitude Prize. Scientists, government officials and other key members of the global health community will come together at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London to discuss and demonstrate their solutions, sharing ideas on topics ranging from crop research and vaccines to child cognitive development and mental health.
Investments in this type of early stage research are incredibly important to driving long-term impact, because they increase the likelihood that the most promising new treatments can be developed quickly, and made available to more people — at lower cost.
We will also be sharing some of the great progress that has been made over the past decade of the Grand Challenges. I am truly excited to see some of these concepts starting to come to fruition.
Ten years ago, a talented researcher named Scott O’Neill was struggling to find an effective method for inoculating the eggs of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with Wolbachia bacteria, which can prevent the mosquitoes from passing diseases like dengue and Zika on to humans. This week we’ll announce a major next step in bringing this method to bear for a number of populations around the world.
Also 10 years ago, a British scientist named Austin Burt theorized that gene drives could be created to suppress Anopheles gambiae, the mosquito species that is largely responsible for transmitting malaria in Africa. Today, we have proof that we can create these mosquitoes, and we believe that they could be deployed to help eradicate malaria within the next decade. Burt’s work will be on display at this year’s conference.
At the conference’s closing, Bill Gates will come together with Richard Branson and Priti Patel — along with a host of celebrity supporters, politicians and the general public — to celebrate the role Britain has played as a global center of innovation. It’s only fitting that this latest chapter in Britain’s long history of fostering scientific research is one that harkens back to one of the earliest.
I encourage you to follow along with Grand Challenges using the hashtag, #GrandChallenges on Twitter and Instagram.
