Colorado State University has received a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will support an innovated global health research project conducted by Brian Foy, professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology.  The grant will fund Foy’s work to control the transmission of disease from mosquitoes.

Foy’s project is one of 104 grants announced by the Gates Foundation for the first funding round of Grant Challenges Explorations, an initiative to help scientists around the world explore new solutions for health challenges in developing countries. The grants were provided to all levels of scientists in 22 countries and five continents.
To receive funding, Foy and his collaborators showed in a two-page application how their idea falls outside current scientific paradigms and could lead to significant advances in global health if successful.
Foy and his colleagues at CU will work to test drugs that could prevent the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria to humans. The study focuses a class of drugs that Foy calls remarkable because they are extremely safe and renowned for their ability to kill many different parasitic worms that impact the health of people and animals. Each year, a half a billion people are infected with malaria through the bite of mosquitoes carrying the disease,according to the Centers for Disease Control. Foy hopes to develop the drugs to kill certain species of mosquitoes – known to carry specific diseases – after the mosquitoes ingest blood from a host treated with the drug.

Grand Challenges Explorations is a five-year, $100 million initiative of the Gates Foundation to promote innovation in global health.