Are Bill and Melinda Gates heavily involved in the vetting and ideas process?
Definitely. We always run our new ideas by Bill to make sure he knows about them. Bill was one of the reviewers. Here’s a guy who’s a bright person, an innovator — why shouldn’t he be able to tell the difference between something that’s good and not? Can you give some examples of grant-winners? In the first round we had approaches whereby acrylamide nanoparticles would be incubated with HIV virions [virus particles] and as they solidified the virions would be washed off. So there would be particles with pockets that exactly fit HIV virions — a little bit like a synthetic antibody. The idea is that you would inject the particles, the particles would mop up the virions in the way an antibody would. That one got funded in the first round and it’s been six months or so and I haven’t heard back from the scientist in Singapore. Another one involved expressing malaria antigens in the salivary glands of a mosquito so that every time a mosquito bit you it was basically inoculating you. That mig
