Other News

Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative Selects 43 Groundbreaking Research Projects for More Than $436 Million in Funding

The Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, a major effort to achieve scientific breakthroughs against diseases that kill millions of people each year in the world’s poorest countries, offered 43 grants totaling US$436.6 million for a broad range of innovative research projects involving scientists in 33 countries. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to create “deliverable technologies” – health tools that are not only effective, but also inexpensive to produce, easy to distribute, and simple to use in developing countries.

The initiative is supported by a $450 million commitment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as two new funding commitments: $27.1 million from the Wellcome Trust, and $4.5 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). The initiative is managed by global health experts at the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and CIHR. Additional proposed Grand Challenges projects are under review and may be awarded grants later this year.

The Grand Challenges initiative was launched by the Gates Foundation in 2003, in partnership with the National Institutes of Health, with a $200 million grant to the FNIH to help apply innovation in science and technology to the greatest health problems of the developing world. Of the billions spent each year on research into life-saving medicines, only a small fraction is focused on discovering and developing new tools to fight the diseases that cause millions of deaths each year in developing countries.

Each of the 43 projects seeks to tackle one of 14 major scientific challenges that, if solved, could lead to important advances in preventing, treating, and curing diseases of the developing world. The 14 Grand Challenges, which were identified from among more than 1,000 suggestions from scientists and health experts around the world, address the following goals:

• Developing improved childhood vaccines that do not require refrigeration, needles, or multiple doses, in order to improve immunization rates in developing countries, where each year 27 million children do not receive basic immunizations
• Studying the immune system to guide the development of new vaccines, including vaccines to prevent malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV, which together kill more than 5 million people each year
• Developing new ways of preventing insects from transmitting diseases such as malaria, which infects 350-500 million people every year
• Growing more nutritious staple crops to combat malnutrition , which affects more than 2 billion people worldwide
• Discovering ways to prevent drug resistance because many drugs that were once successful at treating diseases like malaria are losing their effectiveness
• Discovering methods to treat latent and chronic infections such as tuberculosis, which nearly a third of the world’s population harbors in their bodies
• More accurately diagnosing and tracking disease in poor countries that do not have sophisticated laboratories or reliable medical recordkeeping systems

Following the publication of the Grand Challenges in October 2003, more than 1,500 research projects were proposed by scientists in 75 countries.

The 43 Grand Challenges projects will support cutting-edge research managed by teams of scientists working in partnership across disciplines, with researchers from the developing world and private industry as integral partners in many projects. Many of the initiatives include leaders from fields such as chemistry, engineering, statistics, and business, who have never before focused on global health.
While many of the Grand Challenges projects seek to improve on existing technologies, others attempt to develop entirely new approaches. Examples of the 43 projects include (for a complete list, please see http://www.grandchallengesgh.org):

• Heat-stable vaccines: Many life-saving children’s vaccines must be constantly refrigerated to remain effective, making delivery to areas without electricity very difficult. Several Grand Challenges projects will develop low-cost technologies for formulating vaccines that do not require refrigeration. One research team will encase vaccines in harmless bacteria that have natural temperature-regulating abilities. Vaccines prepared this way could be distributed in ready-to-use packets, mixed with water, and easily consumed. (Lead investigator: Dr. Abraham Sonenshein, Tufts University School of Medicine, U.S.)
• Single-dose vaccines: Most vaccines must be given over weeks or months – a serious obstacle for families who must travel long distances to the nearest health clinic. This project will develop a single-dose version of the vaccine for whooping cough (pertussis), a respiratory disease that causes an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 deaths each year, most during early infancy. The vaccine will be delivered via the mucosal lining of the nose or mouth, stimulating immunity at the surfaces where the whooping cough bacteria usually enters the body. The researchers anticipate that this novel vaccine formulation could also be used for vaccines against other neonatal diseases. (Lead investigator: Dr. Lorne Babiuk, University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
• Mosquito control to prevent dengue: The dengue virus infects up to 100 million people each year, and can cause severe fever, hemorrhaging, and death. Controlling the mosquitoes that transmit the disease is increasingly difficult, in part because many insecticides are no longer effective. This project will employ an innovative strategy for controlling mosquitoes that does not depend on insecticides: researchers will introduce a bacterial parasite that occurs naturally in other insects into mosquitoes so that it causes them to die before they are old enough to transmit the virus. Mosquitoes would “inherit” the parasite and pass it from generation to generation. (Lead investigator: Dr. Scott O’Neill, University of Queensland, Australia)
• More nutritious staple crops: Poor nutrition contributes to half of the almost 11 million deaths among children under 5 each year. This project will develop a more nutritious strain of cassava, a root that is the staple food for more than 250 million people in Africa, but contains little nutrition and can be toxic if not prepared properly due to low levels of naturally occurring cyanide. In addition to increasing the levels of key micronutrients in cassava, researchers will modify the plant to eliminate naturally occurring cyanide and to allow it to be stored for longer periods of time. (Lead investigator: Dr. Richard Sayre, Ohio State University, U.S.)
• New HIV vaccine strategies: To contain the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, it is essential to develop an HIV vaccine that stimulates an effective immune system response. This project will work to develop an HIV vaccine that stimulates immune responses in the lining of the vagina, which serves as the entry point for HIV for most women. To date, most HIV vaccine candidates have not specifically targeted entry points in the body. The research team will work with collaborators in the U.K. and South Africa to design an HIV vaccine that would be time-released into the vaginal lining through low-cost gels or silicone rings that would be inserted into the vagina. (Lead investigator: Dr. Robin Shattock, St. George’s, University of London, U.K.)
• Diagnostics for the developing world: Many serious diseases in developing countries go undetected because the medical tests available in wealthy countries are too expensive or impractical for developing countries. This project will develop a hand-held device that contains miniaturized versions of essential diagnostics tests. Health care workers would load a patient’s blood sample onto a disposable test card about the size of a credit card. The card would be inserted in the device, and in about 10 minutes results would be available from a range of tests, such as those for bacterial infections, nutritional status, and HIV-related illnesses. (Lead investigator: Dr. Paul Yager, University of Washington, U.S.)

[ FYI Index ]

25th Edition of TOP500 List of World's Fastest Supercomputers Released

In what has become a closely watched event in the world of high-performance computing, the 25th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was released today (June 22, 2005) at the 20th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2005) in Heidelberg Germany.

The new TOP500 list, as well as the previous 24 lists, can be found on the Web at http://www.top500.org/.

The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. BlueGene/L also occupied the No. 1 position on the last TOP500 list issued in November 2004. However, the system was doubled in size during the last six months and reached a new record Linpack benchmark performance of 136.8 TFlop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second). This system, once completed, will again be doubled in size and is expected to remain the #1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.

The pace of innovation and performance improvements seen at the very high end of scientific computing shows no sign of slowing down. This time, half of the TOP10 systems on the November 2004 TOP500 list were displaced by newly installed systems and the last 201 systems on the list from last November are now too small to be listed any longer.

The new #2 listed system is also an IBM Blue Gene system with the same architecture but smaller in size than the #1 BlueGene/L at LLNL. It was recently installed at IBM’s Thomas J.Watson Research Center in Yorktown, N.Y. and reached 91.2 TFlop/s.

It is closely followed by the Columbia system built by SGI and installed at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. Calif. Columbia clocked in at 51.87 TFlop/s. The NEC-built Earth Simulator, which has a Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 TFlop/s and had held the No. 1 position for five consecutive TOP500 lists before being replaced by BlueGene/L last November, is now shown as No. 4.

After a close race to the finish line, the updated the IBM-built MareNostrum cluster installed at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center in Spain, gained the No. 5 spot with 27.91 TFlop/s, just barely ahead of the second European system on the list, an IBM Blue Gene system owned by ASTRON and installed at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, listed with 27.45 TFlop/s.

The #10 spot was captured by an early measurement of Cray’s new Red Storm System at Sandia National Laboratories with 15.25 Tflops/. This is also the new entry level for the TOP10 up from just under 10 TFlop/s Linpack performance six months ago.

IBM continues to establish itself as the dominant vendor of supercomputers with now more than half of the list (51.8 percent) carrying its label. The Blue Gene architecture helped IBM to gain a similar standing at the very top of the list, where now six of the TOP10 systems are from IBM, five of these being Blue Gene systems.

As predicted several years ago by the research team behind the TOP500 listing, only systems exceeding the 1 TFlop/s mark on the Linpack were qualified to enter the list this time. The system in No. 500 spot reached 1.166 TFlop/s.Entry level for the TOP500 is now 1.166 TFlop/s, compared to 850.6 GFlop/s six months ago. The last system on the list would have been listed at position 299 in the last TOP500 just six months ago. This exemplifies the continuous rapid turnover of the TOP500.

The last system (#500) in June 2005 has about the same compute power as ALL 500 systems combined, when the list was first created 13 years ago in June 1993. Total combined performance of all 500 systems on the list is now 1.69 PFlop/s (“petaflops” or thousand “teraflops”), compared to 1.127 PFlop/s six months ago.

A total of 333 systems are now using Intel processors. Six months ago there were 320 Intel-based systems on the list and one year ago only 287. The second most-commonly used processors are the IBM Power processors (77 systems), ahead of Hewlett-Packard’s PA Risc processors (36) and AMD processors (25).

There are 304 systems now labeled as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the TOP500.

At present, IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list with 51.8 percent of systems and 57.9 percent of installed performance. HP is second with 26.2 percent of systems and 13.3 percent of performance and SGI is third with 5 percent of systems and 7.45 percent of performance. No other manufacturer is able to capture more than 5% in any category.

The U.S is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 294 of the 500 systems installed there (up from 267 six months ago). A new geographical trend, which started a few years ago, now emerges more clearly. The number of systems in Asian countries other than Japan is rising quite steadily. In this latest list, Japan is listed with 23 systems and all other Asian countries combined have an additional 58 systems. However Europe is still ahead of Asia, with 114 systems installed. China is home to 19 of the systems in Asia -- up from 17 systems six months ago.

In Europe, Germany claimed the No. 1 spot from UK again, with 40 systems compared to 32. Six months ago, UK was in the lead with 42 compared to Germany’s 35 systems.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

[ FYI Index ]

NASA Gives Go for Space Shuttle Return to Flight

NASA has cleared the Space Shuttle to return to flight. After a two-day Flight Readiness Review meeting at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, senior managers approved a July 13 launch date for the shuttle Discovery.

Commander Eileen Collins and her crew are scheduled to lift off at 3:51 p.m. EDT on the first U.S. space flight since the February 2003 loss of the Shuttle Columbia.

The Discovery mission, designated STS-114, is a test flight so astronauts will try out a host of new Space Shuttle safety enhancements. In addition, Discovery will carry 15 tons of supplies and replacement hardware to the International Space Station. July 13 is the beginning of three weeks of possible launch days that run through July 31.

NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Operations, William Readdy, chaired the Flight Readiness Review, the meeting that traditionally sets launch dates and assesses the Shuttle's fitness to fly.

[ FYI Index ]

Deep Impact Mission Hopes to Unlock Mystery of Comets

The fireworks in space may be more specular on July 4, but they will be hard to see as the Deep Impact spacecraft meets its fate on July 4 and smashes into a comet. If scientists have their way, the information Deep Impact sends back will help unlock the mysteries of the inner workings of comets.

Such a complex mission carries its fair share of risks -- like the effects of flying a spacecraft through a wash of dust and ice kicked-off by the comet's tail.

Comets are the trailblazers of the heavens -- rushing through space from the far reaches of the solar system and back toward the sun in long oval orbits. They are made of ice, dust and gas left over from when the sun and the planets formed. Scientists believe comets may hold the keys to the birth of the solar system and perhaps to the birth of life itself.

The target of Deep Impact is Tempel 1, a jet-black, pickle-shaped icy dirt ball traveling at 6.3 miles per second. Since its launch on January 12, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has been racing to catch up with Tempel 1 while observing it along its journey through the solar system.

With a cost of $330 million, Deep Impact is the eighth mission in NASA's Discovery Program, which supports low-budget science missions.

Among the program missions -- the Near Shoemaker mission that landed a spacecraft on asteroid Eros; the Mars Pathfinder mission; and the solar wind collection spacecraft Genesis, which crashed into the Earth when its parachutes failed to open on descent. The Deep Impact spacecraft is composed of two probes mated together -- "flyby" and "impactor."

Flyby is about the size of a small car and will monitor the impact. It carries two cameras -- a high-resolution one, which will be tightly focused on the crater, and a medium-resolution camera, which will take wider views.

The impactor is an 820-pound copper-fortified probe designed to produce maximum wallop when it hits the comet. It also carries a medium-resolution camera that will record the probe's final moments before it collides with the comet.

Because of the spacecraft's distance from Earth -- currently 83 million miles -- communications are delayed, making it impossible for crews on the ground to react in the moments before impact, which is why scientists designed both probes with self-navigational guidance systems.

Tempel 1 is traveling through space at about 23,000 mph (37,100 km/h) -- the equivalent of traveling from New York to Los Angeles in less than 6.5 minutes.

If all goes well, at 1:52 am ET on July 4, Tempel 1 will run into impactor, busting a hole in the comet and revealing its inner core.

Until its death, the impactor will record images and gather data while flyby passes 310 miles (500 kilometers) away, observing the impact, the ejected material, and the structure and composition of the comet's interior. Most of the data will be stored on flyby and radioed back to Earth after the encounter.

Mission scientists hope to have the first images on the Deep Impact Web site within 20 minutes of the encounter.

It's not just Deep Impact that will be observing. Every space and ground-based telescope large enough to do the job will be watching.

The Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, Galex and SWAS space telescopes will all be recording the event. The Rosetta spacecraft, a European probe on its way to another comet will also observe.

On the ground, more than 100 professional astronomers at 60 observatories and a small army of amateur astronomers will also turn their telescopes in Tempel 1's direction.