Context:
Aimed at encouraging Indian scientists to come up with innovative ideas for finding solutions to difficult health problems, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has announced a new initiative called “First in the World Challenge”.
Relevance:
GS II: Health
About the “First in the World Challenge” Initiative:
- “The “First in the World” Challenge, following the success of Chandrayaan-3, is an Indian Council of Medical Research’s flagship initiative that would strive to promote the development of innovative health technologies.
- The scheme shall support innovative, out-of-the box, futuristic ideas that would lead to new knowledge generation, discovery/development of breakthrough health technologies such as vaccines, drugs/therapeutics, diagnostics, and interventions that have never been thought of, tested, or tried in the world till date.
- This high-risk, high-reward program will fund projects at all stages from proof-of-concept to prototype and final product development.
- Must have bold research ideas which would have wide-ranging importance and, if successful should have the potential for “first of its kind “biomedical and technological novelties that would usher better health outcomes in global contexts
- Proposals targeting “incremental knowledge” or “process innovations” are not eligible to be supported under this call.
- Proposals may be from a single researcher or several researchers who submit together: the latter case can arise either from one institute submitting the proposal, or with contributions from two or more institutes.
- All team proposals must indicate one Principal Investigator nominated from the team to deal with technical, administrative and financial deliverables.
- Selection: A selection committee of high repute experts, innovators, policymakers and scientists with outstanding record of conducting research and innovation in the biomedical domain will be constituted.
- This will encourage our scientists to come up with innovative ideas for finding solutions to difficult health problems.
-Source: The Hindu
