India renews MoU with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have renewed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), originally signed in 2012, to support innovative approaches for developing new preventions, therapies and interventions needed to solve health (human and animal), food and nutritional inequities on June

7, 2022 in New Delhi. The renewed MoU pledged a combined $50 million investment to the joint initiative, to continue to explore and expand funding arenas and mechanisms to support innovators, focused on early-mid stage research and product development to tackle health and developmental issues.

The event also saw the announcement of the latest open call for funding on Diagnostics for Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD)- Lymphatic Filariasis (LF). The call focuses on developing point-of-care, novel cost-effective diagnostics for lymphatic filariasis for use in national Lymphatic Filariasis elimination programs. The goal of this challenge is to have a reasonably inexpensive, durable and accurate point of care testing method(s) that can be used in developing/remote geographies.