@[OSLL]

This announcement is written within the framework of Issue #233

GRAND was expected to be an international organization, aimed to accelerate global biomedical research and development efforts on drugs for neglected diseases (suh as malaria...). Now, some history...
In 2006, Andrew Fire and Craig C. Mello shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on RNA interference, which they published in 1998 (less then 10 years from the discovery!). In brief, they discovered a system within living cells that helps to control which genes are active and how active they are. In other words, humanity got a mechanizm to switch off the gene of any disease. Nowadays several biomedical centers are working on technology of genome-driven drugs. Dr. Christophe J. Echeverri (the author of GRAND) works in the same field of research in the Cenix-Bioscience (http://www.cenix-bioscience.com/company/founders/). Dr. Echeverri was recognized in 2003 as one the world's Top 100 Young Innovators by MIT's Technology Review magazine.
The main goals of Dr. Echeverri and his GRAND since year 2007:

• Register non-profit organization
• Recruit members
• Acquire all relevant parts of Cenix-Bioscience from current shareholders
• Start and support biomedical projects
• Launch North America research center

But... Nothing of mentioned has happen. Nowadays GRAND founder still working in Cenix-Bioscience (Drezden) as a Lead Founder. But in spite of absence of any further information about GRAND, Cenix-Bioscience itself focus specifically on accelerating and broadening the application of RNAi gene silencing technology towards the discovery and functional characterization of human genes for the development of novel medicines in a wide range of disease fields (http://www.cenix-bioscience.com/company/about/). Modern IT technologies are used in the act of exploration. For instance, the cutting from official site:

The task of accurately converting complex microscopy images into a series of quantitative numeric measurements is particularly challenging and represents one of the most active areas of new technology development today. For this reason, Cenix has complemented its own strengths in high performance computing and bio-informatics by exploring a wide range of specialized third party solutions, both academic and commercial, to secure the broadest, most powerful capabilities in this area.

That's it. While looking around an interesting resource was found: http://www.nature.com/openinnovation?challengeId=8919320. Their one can find out some interesting problems, needed to be solved. It's like "Answers on mail@ru" for scientists.