The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations program announced last week that it awarded $100,000 grants to each of 81 scientific teams that had submitted unconventional, almost whacky-sounding ideas to improve health in developing countries.

Many wondered whether the program’s second round could generate the same creative idea-flow that characterized its first round, in which 104 scientists were funded last October including one fellow who plans to recruit mosquitoes into an air force of flying syringes that deliver vaccines rather than diseases.

It turned out to be no problem.

The program funded scientists from 17 countries whose ideas focused primarily on infectious disease treatment and prevention.

“Grand Challenges Explorations is our way to help inspire the bold ideas that could one day help transform global health,” said Tachi Yamada, president of the Foundation’s Global Health Program.

Among the compelling projects, Boitumelo Semete at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa will attempt to develop “sticky” nanoparticles that attach to tuberculosis-infected cells and slowly release anti-TB drugs.

Eric Lam at Rutgers will try to develop a tomato laced with antiviral drugs.

Thomas Baker at Penn State will try to infect malaria-carrying mosquitoes with a fungus that essentially gives them a head cold which, hopefully, suppresses their sense of smell and hence their ability to find human prey.

The winners were selected from more than 3,000 applicants.

The grantees are based at universities, research institutes, nonprofit organizations, and private companies in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America.

Applications for the next round of Grand Challenges Explorations are being accepted through May 28, 2009.

With financial support from the Picower Foundation, Mark Bear had been head down looking for a way to restore eyesight in patients with amblyopia.

Not anymore. Bear’s funding is gone.

In fact, the Picower Foundation recently informed its grant recipients that its entire endowment-including the dollars supporting Bear’s efforts-had been managed by Bernard Madoff, and the whole thing is gone.

The Picower Foundation was formed by investor Jeffrey Picower and his wife. Its investment portfolio was valued at $950 million in 2007. It has already ceased grant making and plans to shutter completely in a few months.

“Madoff pulled the rug out from underneath us,” Jim Surmeier, chair of physiology at Northwestern and a participant in Picower-funded research on Parkinson’s disease told the Wall Street Journal.

Experts polled by the Journal estimate Madoff’s Ponzi scheme could ultimately affect millions of people and research from palliative care to diabetes.

Real-estate mogul Mortimer Zuckerman, who pledged $100 million to Sloan-Kettering in 2006, said his charitable trust lost $30 million to Madoff, equivalent to 10% of its value. But he vowed his gift to the New York cancer center would not be affected.

“Long-term, it’s billions of dollars of funding that won’t get made” Melissa Berman Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ CEO told the Journal.

Kay Windsor founder Carl Shapiro was scorched personally for $400 million, and his foundation’s endowment lost an additional $100 million.

He and his wife Ruth had recently pledged $27 million to the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center. Their foundation announced it will honor all current pledges but that’s it for 2009.

“We’re back at the starting gate,” said Bear. “It’s disheartening.”

According to a study published in Lancet, official statistics from developing nations have overstated childhood immunization rates in recent years and the discrepancy may have triggered unwarranted payouts from a charitable organization.

Christopher Murray and colleagues compared government estimates for DPT (diphtheria, pertussus and tetanus) vaccine coverage with results obtained from door-to-door surveys in 193 countries over a 20 year period.

The more reliable survey data showed that DPT coverage increased 5% between 1999 and 2006 across 51 developing nations. Government accounts set the number at 9%.

Six countries exaggerated their gains at least 4-fold, according to the Washington Post. Ten others exaggerated by at least 2-fold.

The disparity occurs in the context of the new “pay for performance” strategy pioneered by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through its $750 million grant to GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations.

GAVI offers a cash reward of $20 per additional child immunized each year over the number immunized in a baseline year as documented by—you guessed it—government estimates.

Since 1999, 51 countries have received payments from GAVI under the Gates program. If study findings are confirmed, GAVI disbursed nearly twice as many reward dollars as it should have: $290 million vs. $150 million.

“Is there intent? We can’t say,” Murray told the Washington Post. “All we can say is that there is over-reporting, and the over-reporting occurs in the presence of financial incentives.”

GAVI has suspended its reward program pending further investigation.

“By early next year, we will modify, drastically change, or possibly put in place a new system of incentive performance,” GAVI’s executive director Julian Lob-Levyt told the Post.

Congratulations to Somerville, Massachusetts, Washington DC and 7 other cities!

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation identified them as national innovators in the fight against childhood obesity. The honor comes with a cash payout from RWJF’s $44 million Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities program which hopes to spread fat-busting social innovations to 70 more communities.

Somerville attacked the scourge on many fronts. The city repainted crosswalks and added bike lanes. Public schools shelved deep fryers and replaced canned fruits with fresh produce. Elementary school kids maintained vegetable gardens on school grounds, and the Rec. Department offered low-cost dance classes.

As a result, Somerville 8-year olds gained one pound less than children in a control group over the course of a school year, according to Tufts nutritionist Christina Economos.

That’s not bad in a community where 44% of the kids are overweight or at risk to become so, and public health officials believe the gains will increase over time.

Since 66% of Somerville students hail from low-income families and half do not speak English in the home, there is hope the innovations can be reproduced in other locations that have been hit hard by the epidemic.

In the nation’s capital, the Summit Health Institute for Research and Education, along with 6 local agencies and community groups will receive $400,000 from RWJF to focus their battle against childhood obesity in Wards 7 and 8.

According to the RWJF Web site, Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities is a national program whose goal is to “implement healthy eating and active living policy- and environmental-change initiatives that can support healthier communities” across the US.

The program emphasizes reaching “children who are at highest risk for obesity on the basis of race/ethnicity, income and/or geographic location.”

As part of its Grand Challenges Explorations program, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded 104 grants in the amount of $100,000 to fund some of the wilder ideas to come from medical researchers in years.

How wild are they? Hiroyuki Matsuoka believes mosquitoes can be recruited into flying syringes that deliver vaccines rather than diseases. Nobel Prize winner Andrew Fire thinks it’s possible to fight viral infections by deactivating a single gene, and another researcher wants to develop “stealth weapons” against HIV.

The Gates foundation rarely funds fringe ideas like this, but the concept behind the program is similar to that used by venture capitalists: if one or two of the funded ideas bear fruit, the entire investment may prove worthwhile. 

The 2-page online application did not require lengthy arguments or data to support a hypothesis, only a legitimate way to test it. And the selection process did not involve peer review. That’s because, “peer review-by definition almost excludes innovation because innovation has no peers,” Tadataka Yamada, the Foundation’s Director of Global Health told the Washington Post.

Yamada ought to know. A gastroenterologist by training, he ridiculed a hypothesis put forth by Australian researchers Robin Warren and Barry Marshall that peptic ulcers were caused by bacteria rather than stomach acid. Marshall eventually swallowed a carafe of the bacteria to prove his point, and nearly died from an ulcer before being cured with antibiotics.

The Australian pair won the Nobel Prize a few years later.

Congratulations to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which this week celebrated the 25th anniversary of one of its most successful initiatives, the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program (AMFDP).

Harold Amos, PhD

AMFDP is designed to increase “the number of individuals from historically underrepresented groups who achieve senior-level rank in academic medicine.”  It is based at Indiana University. Each year, AMFDP awards up to twelve 4-year postdoctoral research grants to physicians from disadvantaged backgrounds who want to establish careers in academic medicine.  Scholars receive an annual stipend of $75,000, and another $30,000 goes to their medical school.

AMFDP has graduated 181 scholars to date. More than 80% remain in academic medicine, including 35 professors. Recently, Harold Amos Scholar Dr. Lisa Cooper received a Genius Award from the MacArthur Foundation for her efforts to improve communication between patients and physicians.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has invested more than $110 million in the project since its inception in 1983. The Foundation renamed the project 5 years ago to honor Harold Amos, PhD, the first African American chair of a department at Harvard Medical School and a founding advisor for the program.

More information on AMFDP can be found here.

West coast philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad announced Thursday that they plan to give $400 million more to the Broad Institute, a genetics research center that is jointly run by MIT and Harvard.  

In 2003, The Broads donated $200 million to establish the Cambridge-based facility. Their cumulative contribution was described by foundation officials as the largest gift in support of a university-based biomedical research facility in the world.

The Broad Institute convenes and supports 1,200 researchers with ties to Harvard, MIT or the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, also in Cambridge. Researchers are usually affiliated with one of the Institute’s Scientific Programs (e.g. cancer, psychiatric disease) and with one of its Scientific Platforms (e.g. genetic analysis, chemical biology) in order to foster idea cross-fertilization.

The Broad’s initial investment was designed to finance the institute for 10 years. There is hope the investment income generated by the new donation can sustain the Institute indefinitely after that.

The Broad Institute secures plenty of funding on its own. Less than a week ago for example, it landed an $86 million NIH grant to develop molecular probes to study biochemical processes that are fundamental to human health and disease.