Deadline: 14 November 2018
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is seeking proposals for the 22nd Round of the Grand Challenges Exploration on the topic of “New Approaches for Manufacturing Gut Microbial Biotherapeutics”.
The Challenge is to make new approaches could substantially reduce the cost of manufacturing microbial biotherapeutics. Biology offers hope that a lower cost solution is possible: the gastrointestinal tract of humans and animals can be considered a living “bioreactor” that is capable of taking in food and producing highly complex microbiota. In other fields, such as vaccine and biologics manufacturing, new integrated and portable systems have substantially reduced the cost of goods. In the food industry, microbial consortia are commonly manufactured at scale within fermented products such as yogurt and kombucha. In wastewater treatment, sludge reactors can stably host a high degree of microbial diversity. Wholly new manufacturing strategies that take into account the underlying biology and ecology of gut microbial communities could yield substantial advances in the arena.
This call for proposals seeks fundamentally new strategies for manufacturing gut microbial biotherapeutics to achieve manufacturing efficiency and cost reductions necessary for global health applications. They are particularly open to high risk, unproven concepts that could yield novel systems. They also encourage approaches that may be carried out in low- and middle- income countries (LMIC) and proposers currently working in these settings.
Program Ideas
Strategies could include (but are certainly not limited to or constrained by) the following ideas:
- Different reactor designs including continuous stirred-tank, multistage and/or multiphasic bioreactors with small footprints
- Disposable or low capital cost bioreactor designs
- Spatial structuring or immobilization at varying length scales, spatial gradients, media viscosity (i.e. liquid or solid state)
- Dynamically changing growth conditions and inoculation strategies reducing batch-to-batch variability
- Various growth conditions including temperature, gas composition, mixing and dilution rate
- Novel, low-cost media components
Funding Information
- Awards of $100,000 USD are made in Phase I.
- Phase I awardees have one opportunity to apply for a follow-on Phase II award of up to $1,000,000 USD.
Eligibility Criteria
GCE is open to both foreign and domestic organizations, including non-profit organizations, for-profit companies, international organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions.
How to Apply
Applicants can apply online via given website.
For more information, please visit Grand Challenges Explorations.