Bill Gates pours thousands into unconventional health research

They are projects that would normally struggle to find funding: creating an anti-viral tomato, a flu-resistant chicken and a magnet that can detect malaria.

• But the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has thrown a lifeline to scores of projects like these, awarding 81 $100,000 (£65,000) grants in a bid to support innovative, unconventional global health research.
• The five-year health research grants are designed to encourage scientists to pursue bold ideas that could lead to breakthroughs, focusing on ways to prevent and treat infectious diseases, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases.
• Among the grant recipients is Eric Lam at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who is exploring tomatoes as a antiviral drug delivery system.
• Three British scientific teams, pursuing novel approaches to preventing and treating infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and pneumonia, have been chosen.
• One team, led by researchers at the University of Exeter in Devon, England, will seek to build an inexpensive instrument to diagnose malaria by using magnets to detect the waste products of the malaria parasite in human blood.
• Scientists from Royal Holloway University, London, are attempting to compile a library of all possible mutations of HIV with the ultimate goal of a vaccine that can protect against many variant forms of the virus.
• In the US, Mei Wu at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School will be getting a grant to see if shooting a laser at a person's skin before administering a vaccine can enhance immune response.
• And Thomas Baker at Pennsylvania State University wants to see if malaria-carrying mosquitoes can be infected with a fungus that would act like a cold, suppressing the sense of smell that they use to find people as sources of blood.
• Each grant recipient will also get the chance of follow-on grants of $1 million if their projects show success.

• Applicants were selected from more than 3,000 proposals, with all levels of scientists represented - from veteran researchers to postgraduates - and a range of disciplines, such as neurobiology, immunology and polymer science.

• The largest philanthropic foundation in the world, the Gates Foundation gave out $2.8 billion last year. It has said payouts this year would grow by about 10 per cent, less than previously planned, because of the troubled economy.

• The foundation was started in 1994 by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife and has the goals of overcoming hunger, poverty and disease internationally. In the US, its focus is on education.