The Open Philanthropy Project, a limited liability corporation funded largely by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, has announced grants totaling $10.8 million in support of high-risk medical research.

Launched in 2011 as a partnership between Good Ventures, the couple's foundation, and the charity evaluator GiveWell, Open Phil was spun off as an independent organization in June 2017. In its latest funding round, the organization asked scientists whose grant applications had been rejected by a National Institutes of Health competition for high-risk, high-reward research to resubmit their proposals and, out of about a hundred and twenty projects, awarded $10.8 million to four teams.

The grants include $6.4 million to Arizona State University to test a cancer vaccine for middle-aged pet dogs; $2.05 million to the University of Notre Dame in support of its efforts to develop an instrument that uses a sub-nanometer-diameter pore to read the amino acid sequence of whole protein molecules; $1.5 million to Rockefeller University to explore a newly discovered mechanism in the life cycle of the yellow fever virus and determine whether the mechanism also occurs in other host-virus interactions; and $825,000 to the University of California, San Francisco in support of efforts to develop a regenerative surgery method for human livers.

Read the full article about the research grants from the Open Philanthropy Project at Philanthropy News Digest