Chewing Gum and Chocolate have made a place among dozens of unlawful approaches to combating worldwide health troubles and are ready to act as new weapons against protozoal infection. These won support today from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is giving out 76 grants of $100,000 each to scientists in 16 nations.

The grants, known as Grand Challenges Explorations, look to encourage creativity among scientists around the world. The grants in the third round went out to researchers who explored new low-cost ways to diagnose diseases, fight malaria and HIV, and find more effective vaccines.

A brief of some prominent winners:

Andrew Fung of University of California, Los Angeles: Directs to build up "MALiVA", a chewing gum, which can identify the presence of protozoal infection in a person's saliva.

Kate Edwards of University of San Diego: Wants to study whether a short bout of work out can make pneumonia vaccine work in a much better way.

Steven Maranz of Weill Cornell Medical College, New York will examine a compound in chocolate to discover whether providing kids high levels of flavanols deprive malaria parasites of lipids needed to survive.

Ranjan Nanda - International Centre for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology, India will try to generate a hand-held "electronic nose", which collects and examines breath samples to diagnose TB.

So far, 262 scientists from 30 nations have been awarded grants though the program and the foundation is presently thinking over applications for the fourth round of funding, which will close on November 02.