Grand Challenges Canada: Innovation and foreign aid on the same page

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Compiled by Shawn Lawrence
Ambitious, altruistic and one-of-a-kind; these are just some of the descriptions that have been thrown around Grand Challenges Canada, a new non-profit organization.

Governed by its own board of directors and guided by a scientific advisory team (made up of some of the world’s most distinguished medical scientists from both the developed and developing world), the organization has a mandate of identifying and launching five grand challenges over a five-year period.

In all, the Government of Canada committed $225 million over five years to Grand Challenges Canada when it was launched May 3, 2010 through its Development Innovation Fund. The fund was set up to “support the best minds in the world as they search for breakthroughs in global health and other areas that have the potential to bring about enduring changes in the lives of the millions of people in poor countries.”

Grand Challenges Canada is working with Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Government of Canada's lead on the Development Innovation Fund, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and other global health foundations and organizations in this endeavor.

CIHR will be responsible for the administration of international peer review, according to international standards of excellence. The results of CIHR-led peer review will guide the awarding of grants by Grand Challenges Canada from the Development Innovation Fund.

Additionally, The McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health based at University Health Network and University of Toronto will be the home for the organization.

The first challenge is “to create a new class of point-of-care (POC) diagnostics that will be easy to use, low cost, multiplex and able to assess disease stage and provide information on prognosis.” In the case of this first Grand Challenge, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is also a partner.

To give our readers a better understanding of how this new organization will work, Biotechnology Focus sat down with Dr. Peter Singer, director of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health and chief executive officer of Grand Challenges Canada. We asked Dr. Singer what makes Grand Challenges Canada unique, how the organization will be governed and most importantly how the organization will make good on its commitment to find sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing health needs.

Q: What makes this organization unique from other national science organizations?

Peter Singer: For starters this is a very unique venture in that it is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving the health and well-being of people in developing countries.

Secondly Grand Challenges Canada relies on a strategy of integrated innovation. And what we mean by that is we’re looking for solutions at the sweet spot between science and technology, the social innovation that’s needed to bring things to scale in health systems and the business innovation that’s needed to create new technologies. As such, these are projects that must integrate scientific, technological, business and social innovation both in Canada and in the developing world towards a common goal. What that’s really trying to say is that science and technology is necessary but not sufficient on its own. You need the business innovation in companies to produce the goods and services, and you need the social innovation and health systems to make sure that those goods and services reach those who need them. And our interest is in taking innovation all the way from the labs to villages because the people we serve are the people who die unnecessarily and who suffer needlessly in the developing world because of the challenges in global health that they face.

Another important thing to note is where the money to support Grand Challenges Canada is coming from. Grand Challenges Canada falls under the international assistance envelope of the Canadian government meaning this is not your usual R&D fund. This is foreign aid funding, and it comes from a financial envelope that is at roughly $5 billion a year. The reason that’s important is that one of the things people want in foreign aid is they want to know that in ten years we’re not going to be funding exactly the same things we’re funding today. The way to accomplish this is innovation or research and development.

Lastly, Grand Challenges Canada is unique in its approach. Through Grand Challenges Canada we are funding a global community of researchers and related institutions on a competitive basis to address the world’s most pressing challenges by developing breakthrough solutions and ensuring that these solutions are available to those who need them the most. And the people that need these solutions the most can be found in the developing world, where more than eight million children die every year before their fifth birthday. When you think about that one fact alone, that eight million children die before their fifth birthday; that should give a sense of the size of the problems we’re tying to tackle, the size of the challenges we face. Grand Challenges Canada offers an opportunity to bring positive and sustainable change in overcoming this challenge.

Q: How do you define a Grand Challenge?
PS: A grand challenge is really a critical barrier between where we are and where we need to be in global health. Our primary focus is on the comparable inequities in global health. The people in the developing world who are dieing prematurely and suffering unnecessarily are the primary community that we serve. It’s about global excellence and impact we believe innovation saves lives.


Q: Why has diagnosing diseases such as malaria more quickly in developing countries through novel tests the first challenge to be tackled by the organization?

It’s about finding the sweet spot between science and technology innovation, social innovation, health systems innovation and business innovation. Point of care diagnostics fits this mold. It involves serious science and technology, it makes things much better and cheaper in the health system and it requires companies to innovate and develop the product.

As a practicing physician I can tell you that diagnosis is the prelude to effective treatment Diagnostics has also been relatively neglected in global health and that’s why we focused on it. The estimate for malaria at the point of care alone, diagnostics can save roughly 100,000 lives, and prevent 365 million unnecessary which drives up costs, wastes resources.

Imagine there’s a child under five who comes to see a health provider in the developing world. The questions immediately asked are is it malaria, what kind of malaria, how severe is it and what drugs is it resistant to? And if its not malaria, is it pneumonia or one of a number of other things that can cause fever. What happens next is a sample is taken but it has to be sent hundreds of miles away to a laboratory to be tested.

By the time the attending physician gets the results back, often times it’s too late. But, if you bring that diagnostic to the patient’s bedside, it’s like a glucometer for global health. It’s right there with instant results and could really help with treatment. The goal is by bringing diagnostic tools to the patient’s bedside we are saving lives, wasting less resources, providing better care, faster and cheaper. The novelty here is that we are developing point of care diagnostics, at the patient’s bedside and there’s a real need for this in the developing world. And its not just tools that diagnose malaria we’re interested in, we’re interested in diagnostics that can diagnose a number of conditions at the same time.

Q: What is the process of being selected? What proposals will get first priority?

PS: We are looking for global excellence and the one’s that will get priority are the ones that meet standards of global excellence and have the likeliest chance of impact.

We will be funding, identifying and putting out applications for and helping innovators come up with solutions for five Grand Challenges over a period of five years. Diagnostics is only the first one, and the request for proposals there of up to $12 million that’s targeted at developing world innovators is only the first step in that first challenge. We will be funding 10-20 proposals and up to $12 million for the first of the five grand challenges. The deadline for the first round of applications is July 12, 2010 at 11:59 pm EST. In all, there will be five Grand Challenges identified and launched over a five year period. The challenges will be determined through an exploration process by Grand Challenges Canada, based on advice from its International Scientific Advisory Board.

The applicants can be either not-for-profit organizations such as universities or for-profit organizations.

On this particular grand challenge we are also working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and they’ve announced a competition of up to $30 million targeted at anybody in the world. We’ve announced $12 million for the time being targeted to innovators in the developing world and so together we’re going to create a community supported up to $42 million focused on the problem of point of care diagnostics for global health and because we’re focused particularly on developing world investigators, we’re enriching that community with respect to developing world innovators or people who are actually face-to-face with the challenges of diagnosis in global health. We’ll also be linking those investigators from the developing world to innovators in Canada. Canada has a very strong diagnostics community in the country, and what we will be doing subsequently which isn’t part of the request for proposals yet but it is mentioned, we will be encouraging the developing world innovators to link with innovators in Canada where that will be helpful.


Q: There is no doubt that Grand Challenges Canada will help redefine Canada’s role in helping the developing world solve some of its most persistent health challenges, but what are the benefits to Canadians and Canadian innovation?

PS: There are three benefits to Canadians. One is that Canadian’s are generous people; they realize that it’s just not right that a child in the developing world is more than ten times as likely to die under the age of five as a child in Canada is. So there are benefits in terms of the generosity of Canadians, which is really in part why we give foreign aid in the first place.

There is a second benefit though when you think about global health, you just have to think about SARS, or pandemic influenza to realize there are no safe houses in the global village. Diseases have no borders.

The problems of health in the developing world are our problems. So there is some self interest in improving health there as well as here. In Canada we may not have been globally minded enough in our approach to innovation, but Grand Challenges Canada does represent a window to be more involved.

The third benefit is that some of the solutions that can apply in the developing world can also apply to communities in Canada, especially in remote areas. Some of the solutions are transferable to communities in Canada and vice versa, and it represents a type of globalization of Canadian Innovation.

I think when we look back five or ten years from now, we’ll look back and say that this was really a real bold, special and effective move that Canada took and what this actually begins to do is it enhances Canada’s brand as an innovating country among nations, outwardly looking towards the world.