Descrição

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invites proposals for cost-disruptive tools for diagnosis and screening in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), defined as devices that amortize capital to near-zero incremental cost and consumable USD 1-class tests that materially reset the cost curve while meeting real-world deployment constraints.

Date Open: 17 March 2026 Deadline: 28 April 2026 at 11:30 AM PDT Webinar: 30 March 2026, 8:30-9:30 AM Pacific Time (registration required)

Background

Nearly half of the global population lacks access to essential diagnostic tests, with access almost nonexistent for up to 81% of people in the poorest settings. This Grand Challenge seeks transformative, high-risk, high-reward innovations that fundamentally rethink how diagnosis or screening is performed, including novel sensing modalities, software-defined diagnostics, and AI-enabled approaches that materially change performance, cost structure, or deployment models.

The Challenge

The initiative aims to source cost-disruptive devices and USD 1-class diagnostics for priority conditions; advance cross-sector, platform, and multimodal solutions for scalable screening and same-visit decision-making; and build a staged portfolio spanning high-risk early concepts to later-stage adaptation and scale.

Cross-Cutting Design Criteria

All proposals must address: rapid actionable results during a single patient encounter; ease of use by minimally trained users in decentralised settings; LMIC robustness in low-resource environments; cold-chain independence; consumables minimisation; a credible cost pathway to approximately USD 1 per test or near-zero incremental cost; and transformative innovation incorporating novel architectures such as multimodal sensing, software-defined diagnostics, or AI-enabled approaches.

Priority Disease Areas and Scope

Tuberculosis: community and primary-care symptom-agnostic screening tools (non-sputum approaches prioritised) and WHO TB diagnostic TPP-aligned point-of-care tests.

HIV: near-point-of-care quantitative viral load testing; point-of-care early infant diagnosis tools; and near-point-of-care CD4 or advanced HIV disease triage tests.

Malaria: high-throughput screening tools for asymptomatic populations with under 1-minute time-to-result; ultra-low-cost non-HRP2 pan-Plasmodium RDTs with sub-USD 1 manufacturing pathways; and AI-enabled or digitally augmented RDT platforms.

Sexually Transmitted Infections: point-of-care diagnostics for gonorrhoea, chlamydia, and trichomonas; syphilis diagnostics; HPV primary screening tools enabling same-visit screen-and-treat; and modular platforms supporting expansion to additional STI analytes.

Maternal and Newborn Health: preeclampsia screening and diagnostics; gestational hyperglycaemia detection tools; rapid point-of-care tools for neonatal sepsis triage; outbreak cluster detection tools for neonatal intensive care units; and triage tools for heavy menstrual bleeding.

Anemia and Women’s Health: non-invasive community-level anemia screening tools and point-of-care diagnostics to distinguish iron deficiency anaemia from other causes.

Nutrition Surveillance and Fortified-Food Monitoring: micronutrient biomarker technologies for subnational surveillance; high-throughput multiplex workflows; and rapid on-site tests for micronutrient content in fortified food.

Enteric Diseases: point-of-care tests for typhoid, Shigella, acute bacterial diarrhea, cholera confirmation, and multi-target paediatric diarrhea panels.

Neglected Tropical Diseases: diagnostics detecting active infection versus prior exposure; point-of-care tests detecting circulating parasite antigens; non-blood-based diagnostics; and high-throughput serology tests for post-MDA surveillance across multiple NTDs.

Emerging Pathogens and Syndromic Testing: rapidly reconfigurable modular platforms for new or emerging pathogens; high-order multiplex serological platforms for population-level surveillance; point-of-care stool-based diagnostics for live poliovirus; and low-cost multiplex platforms for wastewater surveillance.

Manufacturing Innovations: innovations reducing the cost of diagnostic consumables such as reagents, lateral flow assays, and microfluidic cartridges; and novel approaches to reduce device component costs.

Award Structure

Option A: Up to five awards of approximately USD 300,000 each, grant term up to 24 months, for early feasibility and prototyping.

Option B: Up to three awards of approximately USD 500,000 each, grant term up to 24 months, for product refinement and early validation.

Option C: Up to two awards of approximately USD 1,000,000 each, grant term up to 36 months, for mature platforms or advanced adaptation toward field readiness.

Eligibility

Open to research institutes, nonprofit organisations, for-profit companies, international organisations, government agencies, and academic institutions. Applications from projects led by or collaborating with women and researchers at LMIC-based institutions are encouraged. Consortia including LMIC-based organisations are explicitly encouraged. Individuals and organisations classified as individuals for US tax purposes are not eligible.

Not funded: implementation or procurement projects without substantive R&D; discovery-only biomarker projects without a prototype pathway within three to five years; incremental modifications without a plausible step-change in cost or scalability; proposals lacking a plausible cost and operational pathway; and proposals unwilling to share prototypes or data for third-party assessment.

How to Apply

Before applying, review the Gates Foundation terms and conditions, Rules and Guidelines, Application Instructions, and FAQs. Supporting materials are available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Korean on the Grand Challenges website.

• Webinar registration: 30 March 2026, 8:30-9:30 AM Pacific Time