Established in 2003 the Gates founded the initiative Grand Challenges in Global Health and relaunched it on October 7, 2014 as the Grand Challenges, where “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Grand Challenge Partners Commit to Innovation with New Investments in Breakthrough Science”
The “original US$450 million research initiative was created to catalyze scientific and technological innovation to achieve major breakthroughs in global health.” This new initiative is to expand to “a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems.”
On launch day one initiative was to focus “on accelerating the translation of original and innovative concepts for vaccines, drugs and diagnostics into safe, effective, affordable and widely used interventions for diseases in the developing world.” [5]
Since then the Gates Foundation and other funders, such as the Zuckerberg foundation, continue to launch funding opportunities for new Grand Challenges initiatives, both independently and in partnerships.”[4]
On November 8, 2021, through this initiative the Gates Foundation launched Grand Challenges Global Call-to-Action initiative to “build on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and fund cutting-edge science projects that together advance high-priority global health objective.”
Gate’s decides which projects gets the funding and thus plays a key role in directing global health “innovation”, such as “data-centered” health and next generation genomic sequencing! [3]