On 3 March the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation detailed its plans to invest $100 million over the next five years to fund bold solutions to public health problems. The best part: no preliminary results are necessary, and applications need to be just two pages.

Through its Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, the foundation has already poured more than $430 million into 43 grants for projects aimed at developing new and inexpensive tools—such as heat-stable vaccines and hand-held diagnostic devices—for developing-world diseases.

The new scheme, dubbed Explorations, has similar aims. Applications should propose ways to understand and protect against infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and to combat drug resistance. But unlike proposals for the more ambitious Grand Challenge grants, these need not map out the entire solution—only a way to test the initial concept.

Idea seekers: Bill and Melinda Gates Credit: REUTERS/Jeff Christensen

“This [scheme] allows researchers to put forward riskier ideas,” says Steve Buchsbaum, senior program officer for the foundation.

In a bid to attract unorthodox approaches, the foundation is reaching out to scientists in disciplines other than medicine, including physics, chemistry and mathematics, and to those from countries such as China and India.

Initial grants will each top off at $100,000 for one year, but if a project is successful, the foundation will provide another $1 million over two years. In theory, a successful project would then become eligible for the more traditional grants from the foundation. “We are likely to continue funding until we solve that grand challenge or until the barrier that it creates is no longer relevant,” says Buchsbaum.