Davos, Switzerland ? Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced a $200 million grant Sunday to help identify and solve the “grand challenges in global health” that the private sector has little financial incentive to tackle.

Under the program announced at the annual World Economic Forum, a panel of top scientists will draft a list of critical problems whose solution could lead to important advances for the developing world, such as novel ways to combat the AIDS virus or to prevent mosquitos from transmitting malaria.

The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health in Washington then will award grants of up to $20 million to investigate them.

“This to me is an opportunity for us to come together as a world community to find world solutions to health problems affecting all of us,” said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, whose department includes the National Institutes of Health.

At a news conference with Gates, Thompson noted Secretary of State Colin Powell’s recent remarks that the fight against HIV infection and AIDS is “bigger than the war on terror. “People really don’t understand that, but it truly is,” Thompson said.

The money comes from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has focused on promoting health care in poor countries. Bill Gates said he was “super-excited” by the team working on the initiative, which he said he would monitor “with great interest” but not personally participate in.

Chairing the board will be Dr. Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate and president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

NIH director Elias Zerhouni, who will also serve on the board, noted that his agency — one of the world’s leading centers on biomedical research — spends $2.6 billion annually on AIDS — “which affects obviously the United States” — and only about $300 million on other global health issues.

“So about 10, 11 percent of our budget relates to potentially 90 percent of the urgent diseases in the world,” he said.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates announces a 00 million grant to accelerate research on global health issues. Gates spoke Sunday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

He said he hoped the new “public-private” model would help fill the gap in research capacity.

“Progress will not be made unless we are able to interest the … top-flight scientists today to get involved in adapting all the progress we have made to date … to the diseases that affect the developing world,” he said.

Ismail Serageldin, a former World Bank adviser, said that governments and philanthropies had to do more for diseases prevalent in the developing world because there are no big potential profits that would interest drug companies.

“The market isn’t there to justify developing treatments for some diseases that will ultimately have to be given away or sold at cost,” Serageldin said.

The World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of corporate and political leaders, concludes Tuesday.