Professor Scott O'Neill Awarded $A9 Million by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to Attempt to Develop a Method to Eliminate Dengue Fever. (June 29, 2005)

    Currently Scott O'Neil is Head of the School of Life Sciences - University of Queensland.  In the Fall of 1991 He moved to the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University where he worked on Wolbachia bacteria infections of insects. In 2001 he returned to Australia continuing his research on Wolbachia.

Now he has been awarded one of  43 grants (totalling US$436.6 million) by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to investigate "Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiatives". In addition to the $9 million, the University of Queensland will contribute $1 million.

According to the Foundation "The Grand Challenges initiative was launched by the Gates Foundation in 2003, in partnership with the [US] National Institutes of Health, with a $200 million grant to the FNIH to help apply innovation in science and technology to the greatest health problems of the developing world."

The research program headed by Professor O'Neil, will involve 11 groups  including Melbourne University, James Cook University, Queensland's Institute of Medical Research and researchers in Japan, Thailand, Vietnam and the US.

The object: Occurring naturally in up to 70 per cent of insects, Wolbachia is transmitted from parent to offspring via its eggs. Some strains halve the life of infected insects but these particular strains have not been found in the dengue mosquito. Professor O'Neil's multinational team will attempt to inject these life shortening strains into the mosquito because it takes 14 days from birth for the insect to become infective and the hope is that the bacterium will kill the mozzie before the 14th day.

A lot has to go right for the team to achieve success because not only do the insects have to die before they can transmit the dengue virus, the particular strain(s) of Wolbachia must spread effectively through the mosquito population and mosquitos resistant to the the bacterium must not proliferate.

By the end of the five year grant, Scott O'Neil and the Gates Foundation ought to know whether it may have picked a winner. As O'Neil put it to The Sydney Morning Herald, "It's a huge amount of money. It's beyond the scope of any Australian funding. We [Australia] just don't give out grants of this size for high-risk projects."