Gates Foundation – Global Grand Challenges 2025

This year’s challenge topics are:

1. Vaginal products: applications that contribute to development of vaginal formulations that promote optimal drug delivery within the vaginal compartment while positively supporting the vaginal milieu. Anticipation of product-agnostic features that promote vaginal health and that broadly appeal to women to advance product development and formulations for women’s health.

Objectives:

• Leverage biology for vaginally administered products
  • Innovative formulations and delivery approaches that leverage the biology of the vaginal microenvironment to support development of novel delivery technologies and that have high potential for scalable, low-cost manufacturing options
  • Novel components that could be incorporated into and improve existing formulations that would promote maintenance of or transition to an optimal vaginal microbiome and/or promote other benefit to the vaginal mucosal epithelium
• Define characteristics of an ideal vaginal product
  • Support qualitative studies aimed at identifying and understanding specific features of a vaginally administered product that would most appeal to women and seek to use such a product

Projects with a duration of up to two years can have a maximum requested budget of USD 250.000 . Exploratory projects with shorter durations/lower budgets that focus on high-risk, innovative areas are strongly encouraged and will be given priority.

Eligibility:

This initiative is open to research institutes, nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, international organizations, government agencies and academic institutions. We particularly encourage applications from projects led by women and/or researchers at institutions based in LMICs and/or involving collaboration with women-led or LMIC-based organizations.

2. Nutrition: Malnutrition remains one of the most urgent and pervasive threats to maternal, newborn and child health in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). It contributes to nearly half of all under-five child deaths and is a significant driver of maternal and childhood morbidity and mortality.

Incremental improvements are not seeked, this call is for transformative, bold solutions that can reduce costs by at least 50% compared to current baselines, while maintaining or improving safety, efficacy and user acceptability.

The interest is set on three particular nutrients:

• Calcium
• Choline
• DHA

Eligibility:

This initiative is open to research institutes, nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, international organizations, government agencies and academic institutions. We invite innovators from nutrition, biotechnology, food technology, pharmaceuticals and beyond to apply.

Objectives:

• Present transformative cot-reduction strategies
• Provide specific steps and/or end-to-end solutions
• Demonstrate technical feasibility with the ability to generate meaningful data within 12-18 months
• Clearly outline team capabilities and expertise
• Include a justified budget
• Consider and enable manufacturing in LMICs, ensuring cultural and dietary inclusivity (vegetarian, halal, kosher)
• Are informed by consumer research

Deadline: 16 December 2025