Microsoft founder Bill Gates Sunday announced a plan that he hopes will help inspire cures for diseases that kill millions in poor nations. The software mogul told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that his charitable foundation will donate $200 million to help identify and solve "grand challenges in global health" which the private sector has little financial incentive to tackle.

Gates has chosen an international panel of high-profile scientists to draft a list of 10 critical problems whose solution could lead to important healthcare advances for the developing world, such as novel ways to prevent and treat AIDS, developing malaria-resistant mosquitoes, or identifying new vehicles for delivery of micronutrients. The panel is expected to put out their top-10 list sometime this summer along with an invitation to research teams to submit proposals for grants of up to $20 million each.

"While individual submissions will be entertained, the RFA will emphasize the importance of consortia [and] cross-discipline integration," noted a printed version of the announcement, among teams "proposing the most innovative research and development approaches."

Similar top-10 research wish lists have been drawn up before, but backing this one up with a promise of funding could "help to unleash the creativity of scientists where it can have an impact," according to Peter Singer, director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at University of Toronto. Last year, Singer and colleagues published a list of top-10 biotech research areas with the greatest promise of improving health in developing countries.

"Solving the health problems of poor nations is a major ethical challenge," said Singer. "Anything that draws attention to that problem is extremely welcome, but more importantly [this] draws $200 million dollars of attention."

The money will be dispensed through the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the grants will be administered by the non-profit Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). According to a statement by director Elias Zerhouni accompanying Gates' announcement, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will also provide scientific advice, expertise and support, as well as identifying areas that are appropriate for government funding, possibly stretching the impact of the Gates grants.

Partnering with the FNIH and using its existing infrastructure, "Gates will get the biggest bang for his buck," added Kevin Frost, vice president of clinical research and prevention programs at the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) in New York City. His organization leverages its own resources by working in tandem with NIH to fund more aggressive and avant garde research projects which the agency has reviewed but declined to fund.

"It's a clever idea," said Frost of Gates' top-10 list, "but medicine is much more complicated than 'here's the problem, can someone come up with the solution.'" Still, Frost said, science and medicine will benefit from Gates' creative thinking and his model.

Gates said Sunday that the "grand challenges" grant idea was inspired by David Hilbert, a mathematician who devised a set of unsolved math problems in 1900 that stimulated his field for generations. Gates hopes that the global to-do list will also motivate young researchers to think more about how they can improve human conditions.

The panel selected to identify the research challenges and select grant recipients includes top scientists from the US, Britain, India and Ghana, including Zerhouni; Roy Anderson, head of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College; and Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease. Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, a former NIH director and current president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, will chair the panel.