The London-based Wellcome Trust and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in the US have announced a new $25 million grant program for infectious disease research which includes two unusual stipulations: Firstly, the emphasis of the initiative is not on HIV or malaria—which the two charities believe to be well supported by other organizations—but on diseases such as diphtheria, dengue and typhoid fever. Secondly, teams applying for funding must include at least one scientist from the US or Canada, one from the UK, and one from a developing country.

Public health experts have long advocated assistance for developing countries' scientists to increase the number of experts 'on the ground' where diseases are most likely to emerge, but traditional competitive grants tend to favor scientists in industrialized countries. Thus, the initiative aims to foster greater international collaboration among researchers and bolster the scientific infrastructure of developing countries.

Victoria McGovern, Program Officer for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, hopes the program will inspire scientists to study a wider range of public health problems. "The ones that come to mind immediately are really the diarrheal diseases because they have a huge disease burden," says McGovern. Projects may range from designing new control strategies to initiating basic studies of pathogen biology, but the emphasis will be on work with direct applications, she explained.

The five-year grants, which will range from $2–4 million, may ultimately inspire the creation of more multinational research teams. But because of the tight deadline for the first round of applications, which are due by January 15th, officials at the two charities concede that the initial grants will probably boost existing collaborations rather than generating new ones.