NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, December 10, 2012

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced grants totaling more than $21 million to seven projects through its Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.

The grants were awarded through two grant programs under the initiative: Discover New Ways to Achieve Healthy Birth, Growth, and Development, which seeks to better understand the biological mechanisms that cause faltering growth in utero and during the first two years of a child’s life, and Biomarkers of Gastrointestinal Function and Health, which aims to identify indicators of impaired gut function that might negatively affect a child’s development.

Research teams in six countries were awarded grants to study how nutrition or exposure to infection impact health in infancy, childhood, and later in life, according to the foundation’s Impatient Optimists blog. Grant recipients include David Mabey of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who will work with colleagues to test whether treatment with the broad-spectrum antibiotic azithromycin can prevent growth faltering linked to environmental enteropathy, which is prevalent in young children of developing countries; Charles King of Case Western Reserve University, whose team will study how chronic parasitic infections in pregnant mothers affect infant immunity and childhood development; Daniel Roth of the Hospital for Sick Children, who will work with a team of researchers to test whether endocrine factors cause stunting in early infancy; and Theresa Gyorkos of McGill University, who will investigate with colleagues whether treating worm infections in lactating women has a beneficial effect on breast milk production and on infant and maternal health.