UGA gets $18.7M from Bill Gates Foundation

In the largest medical grant in its history, the University of Georgia Research Foundation has been awarded $18.7 million by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to reduce the effects of the tropical parasitic disease schistosomiasis.

The five-year grant will fund research into ways to reduce morbidity from the disease, which is caused by several species of flatworms. Schistosomiasis can damage internal organs and impair physical and cognitive development in children.

About 200 million people in the tropics and subtropics, especially in Africa, are affected by the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dan Colley, director of the university’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, is principal investigator.

Colley, 65, has researched the disease for almost four decades since becoming interested while in Brazil as a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University. He later worked as director of parasitic diseases at the CDC for nine years before joining the UGA faculty seven years ago.

The Gates grant—part of the foundation’s emphasis on neglected diseases—will allow Colley and his team to look at how schistosomiasis is diagnosed and treated internationally.

The disease is transmitted in cyclical fashion. A species of snail picks up the parasite from human waste and replicates it. Through the snail, the parasite gets into water supplies. From the water, it travels through the skin to infect humans, living in their blood vessels.

A drug called praziquantal kills the worms and controls the disease, Colley said, but it has to be administered repeatedly because people are re-infected.

UGA researchers will look at the most effective way to administer the drug and how to ensure that people comply with the regimen, Colley said.

Researchers will also evaluate diagnostic tools, he said.

The university’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases was established in 1998.

The Gates grant is the third-largest in UGA history, according to university officials.

In 2001, the National Institutes of Health awarded a $25 million, five-year grant to Bi-Cheng Wang, a structural biologist, to lead a study of proteins and other biologically important molecules.

And, in 2007, Alan Darvill, cofounder and director of UGA’s Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, received a five-year $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to search for new ways to create biofuels.