Coulter Foundation supported project “Pharmacheck” selected for a Saving Lives at Birth Grant.
USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, UK Aid, the Government of Norway, and the World Bank joined together to launch the research program Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development. The program calls for most innovative solutions to tackle the biggest challenges in maternal and child mortality and to transform the landscape of maternal and child health.
In its second year now, the program asked for transformative solutions, in technology, service delivery or demand that are game changers. This year, over 500 applicants from 60 countries submitted their proposals. BU’s Pharmacheck project was selected for its highly innovative approach to address the issue of counterfeit and sub-standard drugs that affects millions of mothers and babies across the world being affected by diseases ranging from malaria to TB, HIV to postpartum infection. With nearly $75 billion dollars in sales, counterfeit and sub-standard medicines are a major cause of death, financial burden and long-term disease resistance.
The Coulter Foundation funded the Pharmacheck project in 2011-12 and again for the renewal in 2012-13. The 2012-2013 Coulter funding is focused on prototype optimization, and fits perfectly with the Saving Lives at Birth funding that will focus on development of probe libraries and also perform field tests. Thus the Coulter project played an instrumental role in helping create and foster this technology that is now gaining world-wide attention.
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