SEATTLE - Can tomatoes be taught to make antiviral drugs for people who eat them? Would zapping your skin with a laser make your vaccination work better? Could malaria-carrying mosquitoes be given a teensy head cold that would prevent them from sniffing out a human snack bar?
These are among 81 projects awarded $100,000 grants Monday by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in a bid to support innovative, unconventional global health research.
The five-year health research grants are designed to encourage scientists to pursue bold ideas that could lead to breakthroughs, focusing on ways to prevent and treat infectious diseases, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases.
Grant recipient Eric Lam at Rutgers University in New Jersey is exploring tomatoes as a antiviral drug delivery system.
For the past eight years, the director of the university's biotechnology center has been working on a low-cost -- and entirely painless -- way to help people around the world defend themselves from disease.
The Gates grant will help him test tomatoes with antiviral genetic material added to their genes on animals and gauge whether the idea is worth testing on humans.
The goal is to help people build up an immunity to an illness -- influenza, HIV or hepitus-C in Lam's experiments -- by adding specially modified tomatoes to their diets.
Lam said one of the appeals of the idea is that genetically modified tomato seeds could be shipped easily around the world. The taste and look of the tomatoes won't be altered, he promised. All the change would be at the molecular level.
"If it works, it would be a big breakthrough for the developing world," he said.
Andrew Serazin, program officer for the foundation's discovery team, said finding even one or two breakthrough among 100 ideas would make the $100 million Grand Challenges Explorations a success.
"It's really just amazing to see the outpouring of creativity," Serazin said in an interview from Geneva on Monday.
He said the foundation has been so pleased with the number and quality of proposals it received for the first two rounds of the new grant program that it's likely the project would be expanded beyond the five years announced initially.
Other grant programs support high risk research projects with a low expectation of success, Serazin said, but one thing that makes the Gates program unique is the easy two-page application.
"You would probably fill out more information signing up for Facebook," he said. "We want to get straight to the idea."
The applicants are not required to be research scientists working in a university lab and the ideas do not need to be within a scientist's usual area of study, Serazin said.
For example, the first round of grants sent money to a medical doctor in rural Mozambique who wanted to experiment with the architecture of village huts to trap mosquitoes in the home's roof structure, turning houses into mosquito traps, he said.
In other grants announced Monday, researchers at the University of Exeter in Devon, England, will seek to build an inexpensive instrument to diagnose malaria by using magnets to detect the waste products of the malaria parasite in human blood.
Mei Wu at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School will be getting a grant to see if shooting a laser at a person's skin before administering a vaccine can enhance immune response.
And Thomas Baker at Pennsylvania State University wants to see if malaria-carrying mosquitoes can be infected with a fungus that would act like a cold, suppressing the sense of smell that they use to find people as sources of blood.
The foundation also outlined plans Monday to spend $73 million over the next five years to help small farmers in impoverished countries. That program was described by foundation CEO Jeff Raikes at a water conference held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The agriculture grants include $40 million over five years to develop drought-tolerant corn, $13 million over four for more efficient irrigation, and $10 million over four years to help women develop education and training programs related to agriculture.
One of the largest philanthropic foundations in the world, the Gates Foundation gave out $2.8 billion last year.
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