October 24, 2008

Pradip Rathod receives Gates Foundation grant

Professor Pradipsinh Rathod was one of 104 recipients of a grant through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation‘s new initiative, Grand Challenges Explorations in Global Health. Rathod’s grant will support a project titled “Strategies to Disable Hypermutagenesis in Malaria Parasites,” which targets components of the malaria genome and develops partner drugs to disable parasite hypermutagenesis, allowing older methods of treatment to be effective against the disease.

The Gates Foundation believes that “creative, unorthodox thinking is essential to overcoming the most persistent challenges in global health,” and the Grand Challenges Explorations initiative is designed to “foster innovation in global health research and expand the pipeline of ideas that merit further exploration.” The initiative features an accelerated grant-making process with short two-page applications requiring no preliminary data. Initial grants of approximately $100,000 are awarded, with the possibility of additional funding ($1 million or more) for projects that show promise. The projects selected fit into the fourteen “grand challenges” set forth by the Gates Foundation, which address seven long-term goals to improve health in the developing world, such as creating new vaccines, improving nutrition, and establishing quantitative assessments of overall population health.

To view the full article in UWeek, please visit: GCGH article.

The awarding of the GCGH grants was covered by the local press, with articles in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times.

For more information about Pradip Rathod and his research, please visit his faculty page.