After celebrating its one-year anniversary last month, the non-profit Grand Challenges Canada today announced 19 recipients of its first-ever $100,000 grants for the Rising Stars in Global Health program. Applicants proposed ideas for improving health in impoverished regions around the globe and recipients were hand-selected through a peer review process by members of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Grand Challenges Canada will award a total of 60 of these federally-funded grants in the next year, followed by an additional $1 million to each of the projects that pan out best. “People have great ideas: they just need to be funded to test them and take them to where they’re needed,” says organization chief executive Peter Singer.
Along with a written project proposal, applicants submitted a short video explaining their ideas to the general public. In their films, nearly all the prize recipients sketch out their plans on whiteboards or demonstrate with lab supplies. They don’t present any data — because they shouldn’t have any yet. The first round of grants goes to ideas that are all framed as proof-of-concepts. Using the first $100,000, the prize recipients will have to show “promising results” to get to the next round, demonstrating that their ideas “can actually go to scale and make a difference,” Singer says. Projects include a fetal heart monitor powered by wind-up electricity, a malaria test entirely contained within a blood collection tube, and a tuberculosis test that costs less than two dollars.
The idea pitched by adjunct biochemist Anny Fortin of McGill University in Montreal, a first-round grant recipient, is to use a tattoo machine to deliver an experimental drug against the parasitic disease leishmaniasis, which is transmitted by the sandfly in regions such as Latin America and the Middle East. The ‘cutaneous’ form of the illness produces gruesome lesions and ulcers on the skin. Although the infection affects approximately 12 million people, causing them disability and discrimination due to severe scarring, there has been little investment in developing treatment. “Because people don’t die from this disease, no one really has money for it,” says Fortin. Just as tattoo machines deliver ink under the skin with precision, she hopes they could offer similar control for applying a drug to kill the parasite. Additionally, this delivery method could be used for other drugs in the future, she says.
It would not be the first attempt to make invisible tattoos of medicines. In 2009, for example, researchers from the Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion in Prague tested whether they could adminster an HPV vaccine with a tattoo machine. This method generated a stronger immune response in mice, generating some excitement, but that research is still under development.
See Dr. Fortin’s video of her tattoo drug application below (in French).