SentiSearch, Inc. (SSRC)

[e-ore]

Found in the NY Times, published 12/21/10:

Five Years In, Gauging Impact of Gates Grants
SEATTLE — Five years ago, Bill Gates made an extraordinary offer: he invited the world’s scientists to submit ideas for tackling the biggest problems in global health, including the lack of vaccines for AIDS and malaria, the fact that most vaccines must be kept refrigerated and be delivered by needles, the fact that many tropical crops like cassavas and bananas had little nutrition, and so on.
About 1,600 proposals came in, and the top 43 were so promising that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made $450 million in five-year grants — more than double what he originally planned to give.

...Mosquito ‘Olfacticides’
As the inventors of “a cell line that behaves like a mosquito antenna, recreating mosquito smellers in a dish,” Leslie B. Vosshall of Rockefeller University and Dr. Richard Axel, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Columbia University, got $5 million to hunt for molecules that could block mosquitoes’ ability to detect people. Dr. Axel shared a 2004 Nobel Prize in Medicine for cloning insects’ olfactory receptors.
“When you puff human odors over the cells, they get excited just like mosquitoes would,” Dr. Vosshall explained. In this case, they turn fluorescent green.
They tested 91,000 compounds in Rockefeller University’s chemical library and found five that jammed the antennae. Their Gates grant is renewed for two years, but they now have a contract with Bayer CropSciences to screen its two million compounds — the same smell mechanism is used by corn borers, apple maggot flies and other farm pests. (my emphasis, link to details of the 2 year SSRC agreement with Bayer below.)
The ideal, Dr. Axel said, is a repellent harmless to humans that works at a fraction of the concentration of DEET..."

the whole article
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/health/21gates.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp

SSRC'S agreement with Bayer Crop Science
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/61922062/Research-And-Product-Development-Agreement-Project-Research-And-Product-Development-Agreement---SENTISEARCH----11-15-2010

From the last SSRC 10k:
"We believe the applications offering the greatest potential for developing products in the intermediate term are for mosquito repellants to be sold by household product companies"