Gates Foundation’s New Grant Opportunity: “Achieving Healthy Growth”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has issued a Request for Proposals for its new grant program called “Discover New Ways to Achieve Healthy Growth” under the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.

The goal of this opportunity is to elucidate new pathways or mechanisms that will directly inform the development of interventions for the prevention of impaired growth, i.e. stunting and wasting, and the associated impaired cognitive development during the first 1,000 days following conception in the developing world.

The program seeks to address the challenge of lack of new research needed to address the underlying biological mechanisms and pathways associated with growth restriction, stunting, and wasting during the first 1,000 days following conception (-9 to 24 months).

The program will address three developmental age groups:

• Prenatal, including preconception factors as well as those during fetal development
• Infants from birth to 6 months of age
• Infants from 6 to 24 months of age

For each of these developmental segments, the program will be focused on approaches to discover or inform the development of novel interventions and the capacity to monitor the effect of these interventions at a mechanistic level, while addressing the role of infection, exposure to environmental toxins (e.g. aflatoxin), and nutritional insults.

The deadline to submit applications for this grant opportunity is January 25, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

For more information, visit this link.