Announcing itself a winner of Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the University of Otago stated that the Associate Professor Russell Poulter of the Department of Biochemistry will be carrying out an innovative global health and development research project titled "Targeting HIV provirus with novel restriction endonucleases".

Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) is into funding different research projects across the world that are aiming at exploring new ideas to solve the contemporary issues of global health and development challenges.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced 6 grants over 85 Grand Challenges Explorations Round and Poulter's project is one of the those projects.

Chris Wilson, Director of Global Health Discovery at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, stated, "GCE winners are expanding the pipeline of ideas for serious global health and development challenges where creative thinking is most urgently needed. These grants are meant to spur on new discoveries that could ultimately save millions of lives".

Explaining more about his new project, poulter said that it would be dealing with evaluation of enzymes, homing endonucleases, to find out their effectiveness in eliminating HIV from infected cells.

Researchers believe that this project will surely help them in modifying the enzymes to cut HIV DNA within infected cells without risking collateral damage to the human genes.