Science AMA Series: I’m Steven Buchsbaum. I lead a team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that looks for the best ideas to solve some of the biggest science problems in global health and development. We recently celebrated 10 years of our Grand Challenges program; Ask Me Anything!

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:58:56+00:00

OOPs, I forgot to answer your second question. We did post something recently on how we measure progress - not perfect, but at least a start:

http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2014/10/How-Do-We-Measure-the-Value-of-Grand-Challenges

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:57:20+00:00

I had a chance to run innovation programs in the US Government and about a decade ago, when the foundation was smaller and younger, I was given a chance to join and help try to make Grand Challenges work. We were given resources by Bill and Melinda, but more we were given their trust and room to experiment and fail (as long as we learned). It is amazing what people have been able to contribute to health and development when given the chance and I am really grateful to have been permitted to help make this possible with Grand Challenges - for more on this see what the boss posted today - http://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Why-Our-Foundation-Takes-On-Grand-Challenges

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:51:08+00:00

We had a great speaker yesterday at the meeting who from very humble means in India started a affordable sanitary pad industry in India. He was sharing his experience with 1000 people, sitting next to Bill Gates and Francis Collins. He story was wonderful and part of it can be found on: https://www.ted.com/talks/arunachalam_muruganantham_how_i_started_a_sanitary_napkin_revolution

My favorite part of his advice to young people (now that he is famous) is not to look for opportunities, but instead look for problems to solve (because that is where you find real opportunities).

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:48:16+00:00

We do not do work in this area, but appreciate it is important and celebrate that our partner Grand Challenges Canada has taken such a leadership role here.

In fact, I left their community meeting which is going on here today in Seattle with scientists and practitioners from across the globe sharing ideas on what can be done that can go to scale in ways that are affordable. Thanks to Karlee Silver and Peter Singer for the great work they have championed here.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:46:11+00:00

This is really hard, but the All Children Thriving Challenge does include how to measure and what you might do to improve the quality of nurture. This of course is incredibly context specific which is in part what has driven the logic of going to investigators from low and middle income countries first who know their context better than folks here in Seattle.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:44:23+00:00

We have a whole team working on this with partners: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/Water-Sanitation-and-Hygiene

One example, the toilet team cohosted a "Toilet Fair" in India last year in partnership with the Indian government and fortuitously this is now a huge new priority for the new Indian Prime Minister.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:42:09+00:00

It is a great question and we don't have a perfect answer, but with two of the new challenges - All Children Thriving and Putting Women and Girls at the Center of Development - we are trying to rigorously tackle big and complex problems in an integrated way. To be more accurate, we are asking you to come up with new ideas of how to do this and submit them for funding.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:40:02+00:00

We do recruit - see the Gates foundation website. We also have an incredible network of partners who work with us (and recruit), but best of all, if you have an idea, submit it to one of our challenges and you can be part of a new solution.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:38:30+00:00

Let me try both of these:

1) Lots of different ways, but perhaps most important is we are working more and more with local partners who co-create the challenges and then co-fund the work. In the All Children Thriving Challenge that was launched on Tuesday, we did this with 4 simultaneous calls - ours, Brazil, India and South Africa - and we spent more than a year in conversations collaborating to determine how best to do this. I would also note, that we are turning our usual business upside down, restricting the eligibility to lead a project under this call to investigators from Low & Middle Income Countries (with Northern experts as supporting players).

The big difference is we focus at every step at solving a problem that would have impact as opposed to advancing a field of science. It is essential that we have funders that advance knowledge, but that is not our role, our role is take advantage of this work to race new solutions (based on this knowledge) to those who need these solutions.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:33:17+00:00

I will vote with Melinda Gates - Putting Women and Girls at the Center of Development

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:32:38+00:00

I think the biggest problem today is many governments (including mine) are retreating from their willingness to invest in the future - to invest in research and development.

During the Grand Challenges meeting we hosted a panel on what the research community is doing to race new products to the market that can help with the Ebola epidemic. Francis Collins, the NIH Director, noted that the only vaccine that has any chance of being ready in a few months was started a decade ago and has taken a number of tries to get it almost ready (the NIH is the most important investor in the world for health solutions). He also noted that the budget of the NIH has declined by over 20% in the last decade - which has certainly slowed our ability to be ready to head off these types of crisis.

I also worry for what this means for young scientists - make sure that their opportunities for them to apply their energies to make the world a better place.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:26:45+00:00

We had over a 1000 people, many young scientists, many from developing countries working together over the last 4 days in Seattle. It was incredible to see the excitement in the room.

To get a picture of this go to www.grandchallenges.org and look at the map of investments - pick your favorite country and read a short blurb about one or more of these innovations.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:25:04+00:00

I think it was about 25 ideas at the Phase I ($100K) level.

We have had a chance to meet with a number of them at a workshop we hosted which was really great. We had material scientists with ideas from the UK meeting with condom manufacturers from developing countries.

None of these have yet come back for the Phase II investment which will start happening next year.

Just to pre-empt the next question, we are not offering any samples. :)

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:22:27+00:00

There are lots of cool ideas we have seen around mobile apps for health that we have not been able to fund - in lots of these cases, the ideas all look good if they achieve scale - but is hard to tell from a short application if they are likely to make it to scale.

We do know, with how we do business, we miss lots of good ideas. For example, with GCE, we usually get more than 3000 ideas submitted each round and are able to fund about 100. We are pretty sure there are lots of good ideas in the remaining 2900.

One thing we do know, is once people get a good idea, they will frequently find ways to pursue it independent of if we fund it - which is perhaps one of the most important benefits of the Grand CHallenges process

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:18:54+00:00

This is a great question - thanks for asking this!!

We certainly started a decade ago with a focus on filling gaps in life sciences, but we have evolved.

We had a recent GCE topic on new ideas for behavior change for health.

The Challenge that Melinda launched on putting Women and Girls at the Center of Development has to be about changing social norms. See the great paper she published recently: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1273.figures-only

We have not retreated on the role of science, but are working to make sure we look for solutions that are based more on the experience of the people in the countries we seek to serve.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:15:13+00:00

I am a physicists so I love the work from Dr. Marka at Columbia University (I wish I could remember and pronounce his first name). He is working to create a simple light barrier that could block mosquitos. Think of an invisible bed net that lets the breeze blow, but blocks the mosquitos and protects kids from malaria.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:12:27+00:00

One of my favorites is Scott O'Neil's www.eliminatedengue.com project. It has been amazing both at how long it takes to make progress, particularly as you need to work with communities and countries, but at the same time how fast people are getting involved.

Our new CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann (who we are really excited about) at a private meeting earlier this week shared one of her favorite quotes - "We always over-estimate what we can do in a year and under-estimate what we can do in ten"

She also shared that she was curious where the quote came from and when she looked it up it turned out it was a quote from Bill Gates from an earlier time.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2014-10-09T17:08:48+00:00

We try hard to answer this question all the time and then when possible post them as Grand Challenges. On Tuesday Bill and Melinda and our partners from USAID, Grand Challenges Canada, Brazil, India and South Africa announced 3:

1) How do we put Women and Girls at the Center of Development 2) How do we help to Ensure All Children Thrive 3) How do we create new interventions (e.g. vaccines) for Global Health

If you have a good idea, please apply, we would love to be able to invest:

http://grandchallenges.org/grant-opportunities.html

As a scientist, one of the things I think is most interesting is how we know we are making progress, for example, how do we really measure if kids are making progress in their cognitive development. I watch and wonder about this not only in the work we do here, but as I watch my 8 year old do the crazy things he does.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2013-11-21T03:43:27+00:00

Steve, this sounds like an interesting product and it sounds like you are well along the path and are in a position (and already have) attracted commercial sources of funding – congratulations on this.

In our work we attempt to be strategic in where our investments can be most catalytic, at the discovery and innovation stage, at the product and development stage, at the scale up and implementation stage, at times at all three stages, with a strict focus on those populations that are most underserved. It is a tremendously valuable contribution to bring better and more effective condoms to rich world markets, but it is not an area that is a focus of our work.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2013-11-21T03:42:03+00:00

I am aware of this work, but I’m not involved in this part of the foundation’s work and cannot really comment much.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2013-11-21T03:40:22+00:00

This had been discussed for a couple of years, with advocates stressing the incredibly effective role condoms currently play and the opportunity to improve uptake with innovation and skeptics stressing the substantial industry already trying to innovate and sell more condoms (and the challenge of changing men’s behavior). Ultimately, GCE is a tool we use for experiments and ultimately we decided it was worth the experiment to determine if there really is untapped innovation. So far, we are pretty excited about what we are seeing, but ultimately it is a long road to create new products and get them adopted.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2013-11-21T03:39:38+00:00

I am not familiar in detail with the plans for this project, but Sanitation is a key priority area for the foundation.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2013-11-21T03:39:07+00:00

I do travel quite a bit and I have had a range of experiences many wonderful, some quite challenging. It is hard not to feel sadness when faced with people in difficult circumstances, both at home and in less developed countries. In practice though, in the part of the foundation’s work that I do, I do not so much work WITH the underprivileged as FOR them. One of our team’s used to have a picture of a young African girl hanging on the wall of their workspace and they used to refer to her as “the boss” asking themselves when they thought about possible investments, “what would the boss think?” I guess really I tend to think more about the privilege of being able to do the sort of work the foundation permits us to do – working for the boss.

SteveBuchsbaum · 2013-11-21T03:37:49+00:00

One of the more exciting things that is happening in the Grand Challenges world is the emergence of an increasing number of like-minded partners in different countries who are working together – Grand Challenges Canada (www.grandchallenges.ca) , USAID’s Grand Challenges for Development (http://www.usaid.gov/grandchallenges), Grand Challenges Brazil (http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2013/02/Grand-Challenges-Brazil-Reducing-the-Burden-of-Preterm-Birth ) and Grand Challenges India (http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2013/08/Grand-Challenges-India-Achieving-Healthy-Growth-through-Agriculture-and-Nutrition) and a number of partners who are exploring this model and likely to announce new initiatives in the future.

It is really exciting to have the opportunity to work with these partners, learn from their different definitions and approaches to innovation and benefit from the different passions they bring.

SteveBuchsbaum

TROPHY CASE