SAN FRANCISCO — Two local research groups were beneficiaries of large grants made this month by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Intel chairman Andy Grove. OneWorld Health, a non-profit pharmaceutical company, received $4.6 million last week from the Gates Foundation, and Intel chairman Grove launched the University of California San Francisco's new Stem Cell Discovery Fund on 8 August with a $5 million matching grant.

The private money will allow UCSF to create new stem cell lines, expanding the pool of cells available to researchers under restrictions imposed by President Bush last August, and will permit OneWorld Health to fund testing of two drugs in development for "orphan" diseases.

Stem cells are a personal interest of Mr. Grove, who serves as national chairman of the UCSF capital campaign, according to a university spokesman. Grove's $5 million contribution to the UCSF Stem Cell Discovery Fund is in the form of a matching grant, the 'Grove Stem Cell Challenge', for gifts of $50,000 to $500,000.

Embryonic stem cells were co-discovered in mouse studies during the early 1980s by UCSF developmental biologist Gail Martin, who coined the term. The institution developed one of two existing human stem cell lines in NIH's Stem Cell Registry, and will use the Discovery Fund to cultivate and study new stem cell lines.

A pair of Gates Foundation grants to OneWorld Health will fund trials of drugs for visceral leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. OneWorld Health was founded in 2000 by pharmaceutical scientist Victoria Hale to find and develop new drugs urgently needed in the developing world. Working with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other agencies, Hale's group has identified a number of leads based on molecules with proven efficacy that have been abandoned by industry or academia, largely for economic reasons.

One of these, paromomycin, is an antibiotic developed in the 1960s and found to have activity against the parasite that causes visceral leishmaniasis after the drug went off patent. Visceral leishmaniasis infects 500,000 annually, killing some 60,000, mainly in the Asian subcontinent, Brazil and the Sudan. With $4.2 million from the Gates Foundation, OneWorld Health and WHO will conduct a large phase III trial of paromomycin in India.

A second Gates Foundation grant of $476,000 was designated for pre-clinical testing of the protease inhibitor K777, a potential treatment for Chagas disease, an illness that afflicts some 16–18 million people in Central and South America. K777 inhibits an essential protease of the disease-causing parasite and came to OneWorld Health from Celera, which acquired rights to the drug when it bought the small biotech firm that developed it. Because of its limited commercial value, Celera gave OneWorld Health rights to the drug in an irrevocable exclusive license that waives any royalties.