NEW YORK – The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded more than 180 new grants in July, several of which are related to omics and diagnostics projects. Following is a selection of notable grants:
- PATH of Seattle was awarded approximately $4.4 million over 35 months "to ensure availability and access to a pipeline of affordable malaria diagnostic tests."
- Prolific Machines of Emeryville, California, was awarded approximately $2 million over 13 months "to use optogenetics in monoclonal antibody manufacturing to reduce the cost of goods and make them affordable and accessible to vulnerable populations in lower- and middle-income countries."
- The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine was awarded approximately $1.9 million over 48 months, and the Uganda Virus Research Institute in Entebbe was awarded approximately $1.6 million over 48 months "to pilot methods of detecting insecticide resistance in mosquitoes using genomic sequencing in Africa."
- The Botswana Harvard Health Partnership of Gaborone was awarded approximately $1.4 million over 12 months "to support core efforts to prepare study sites and communities for [an] upcoming genomic epidemiology study."
- Wits Health Consortium of Johannesburg was awarded $750,000 over 38 months "to build public health modeling capacity in Africa for integrated multi-pathogen serosurveillance data in Kenya, Malawi, and South Africa through collaboration, scientific exchange, and mentorship."
- Wits Health Consortium was also awarded approximately $120,000 over 12 months "to support a workshop on advanced tuberculosis diagnostics for technical agencies, African tuberculosis programs, diagnostics manufacturers, and community stakeholders."
- Washington University in St. Louis was awarded approximately $630,000 over 23 months "to use a reverse genetics approach to develop a higher titer rotavirus strain and novel cell line."
- Cedars-Sinai Precision Biomarker Laboratories of Los Angeles was awarded approximately $573,000 over 14 months "to develop a late pregnancy point-of-care test for prediction of preeclampsia."
- Health Research Operations Kenya Limited of Kilifi was awarded approximately $500,000 over 18 months "to understand the diversity of colonizing K. pneumoniae strains in hospitalized neonates in Kenya."
- L'Institut de Recherche Biomédicale 1 Health of Kinshasa, Congo, was awarded $200,000 over 17 months "to evaluate community-based diagnostics strategies for sickle cell disease."
- The University of California, San Diego was awarded approximately $87,000 over nine months "to develop a diagnostic method utilizing direct detection of mRNA by Cas13a for [low- and middle-income countries]."
- The University of Oxford was awarded approximately $83,000 over seven months "to sequence K. pneumoniae and E. coli isolates from neonates in Nepal to understand high-resolution characterization of bacterial taxonomy, antimicrobial resistance genes, virulence factors, and molecular epidemiology."