Biomedical research takes a hit
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My friend the eye researcher sent me the letter from the president of her institution. She's affected by the most recent Musk activity.
Here's what happened:
In a Friday night move that quickly drew howls of protest from the U.S. biomedical research community, President Donald Trump’s administration today announced it is immediately reducing by at least half the so-called indirect cost payments that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) makes to universities, hospitals, and research institutes to help cover facilities and administrative costs.
A 15% indirect cost rate will now apply to all new and existing grants, NIH said in a memo from its Director’s office. Typically, about 30% of an average NIH grant to an institution is earmarked for indirect costs, according to NIH, but some universities get much higher rates. In 2023, NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, spent nearly $9 billion on indirect costs; the change would likely leave research institutions needing to find billions of dollars from other sources to support laboratories, students, and staff.
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-slashes-overhead-payments-research-sparking-outrage
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Cut the budget! Cut the budget! Except for my (red) state....
When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
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@wtg said in Biomedical research takes a hit:
Cut the budget! Cut the budget! Except for my (red) state....
Exactly.
IIRC there's a vaccine close to completion for norovirus. I'm really worried about how all this bs will impact that, either the vaccine's completion or its approval and rollout.
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Great post on Substack from Heather Cox Richardson.
Gee. Why didn't anyone think of this?
Lawmakers from Republican-dominated states are now acknowledging what those of us who study the federal budget have pointed out for decades: the same Republican-dominated states that complain bitterly about the government’s tax policies are also the same states that take most federal tax money. Dana Nickel of Politico reported yesterday that Republican leaders in the states claim to be enthusiastic about the cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency but are mobilizing to make sure those cuts won’t hurt their own state programs that depend on federal money. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt told Nickel that governors can provide advice about what cuts will be most effective. “Instead of just across the board cutting, we thought, man, they need some help from the governors to say, ‘We can be more efficient in this area or this area, or if you allow block grants in this area, you can reduce our expenditures by 10 percent.’ And so that’s our goal.”
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Those Red-State GOP leaders surely know that their Democratic counterparts are watching and taking notes. A Democratic administration in 2028 could crush the most ruby red parts of the nation in a flash by tweaking federal spending away from them and toward "friendly" blue states. One reason we have succeeded over the years is in having some solidarity across political lines to make transfers hard to manipulate for political gain (i.e. by making it difficult to reward friendly state and punish "enemy" states).
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Someone is compiling stats regarding the amount of money that will be lost, by state.
https://bsky.app/profile/dianamonkey.bsky.social/post/3lhocfav66s2p
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From my friend who does medical research:
The Dean of the school of med gave a town hall meeting today. Deans of all of the medical schools met last weekend and are taking this very seriously. [University of X} stands to lose $38M if it loses these indirect costs, which would result in the firing of 100s of docs, reduced salaries, and halting of clinical trials, paticularly those in the cancer center. At the same time, the state is shaving $7.5M off our budget because it ran a deficit last year. The university is a non-profit institution. It doesn't create much of a surplus for a rainy day. It doesn't turn away anyone regardless of ability to pay. 40% of its patients are medicaid, which is also targeted under Dr. Oz. Some of its medicaid patients are formerly wealthy patients who had major health issues and lost everything.
I used to be one of those talking heads that said that TFM can't possibly get away with any of this stuff. Not so sure anymore, and many people are already suffering.
NIH generates more that $2 for every dollar spent. Between 2010 and 2019, every single drug that came to market was developed using NIH funding. We have been told to stop spending NIH grants until this gets straightened out. What DOGE really wants to do is cut $40 billion from the NIH budget. I have a grant proposal going into NIH this summer that I doubt will get funded if TFM and his billionaire buddy are successful, which means my salary will be cut to the extent that I will no longer be able to afford living in [city]. I'll just have to quite doing research. I won't be the only one. Because docs and scientists make far less than they would in the private sector, we are already a bare-bones operation
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Another update:
We just had a virtual town hall meeting with the president and several constitutional law professors. Several things: 1) Congress must determine if there are to be new offices, like DOGE - not the president; 2) Congress is "enfeebling" itself, and if they don't challenge the executive branch's conscription of Congressional power, then there is no way to stop it, unless it is unconstitutional; 3) there are processes that need to occur to indicate that the action taken by the executive branch has been researched and fairly applied; and 4) this stuff is going to be tied up in the courts forever. In the meantime, no more grants are being evaluated by NIH, which will shortly lead to a stoppage of research and clinical trials. When that happens, skilled people, including investigators, will be let go and it will take a long time to re-establish the projects.
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Holy cow.
The Trump administration says it has canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over what it described as the school's failure to police antisemitism on campus.
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My post on this next door:
We are co-funding a project with the NHLBI (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, one of the Institutes within NIH).
The NIH funding is a "U grant", which is a multi-center grant. NIH is funding 6 centers and we're funding 2 more, plus an overseas validation cohort (in Ireland). We're also funding some liver analyses in the original 6, as NHLBI doesn't fund liver stuff.
The project is the Alpha-1 Biomarkers Consortium. Biomarkers are just biological markers of a disease, useful ones can be predictive of prognosis or indicative of disease progression. Our main goal is to find more sensitive and less invasive clinical trial endpoints that will facilitate bringing new treatments to market.
[Quick aside on endpoints - the endpoint(s) of a trial are what you're trying to measure to prove efficacy. It might be mortality in an oncology trial - what's the median survival of the subjects in the treatment arm vs the control arm? In most disease conditions (thankfully) it's something else. Maybe lung function, liver enzymes, fibrosis scores, cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels, A1C, etc., depending on the disease. There are also 'patient reported outcomes' such as pain, shortness of breath, scores on standardized questionnaires, etc. In AATD we have shitty endpoints - spirometry for lungs and usually fibrosis/cirrhosis staging for liver. The former is very noisy and requires a large number of subjects over a long time for statistical significance (bad for a rare disease, it makes the trials unrecruitable). The latter is very invasive (liver biopsies suck) and limits trials to people with pretty advanced liver disease.]
So this project is following 270 alphas over three years (ultimately longer, but current funding is for three years). We're testing them periodically for every conceivable biomarker including some really specific stuff like obscure biological byproducts of elastin breakdown or cell death in the liver, etc. The idea is to find something sensitive so we can measure disease progression faster, and with fewer patients. We would need to show that our biomarker correlates sufficiently well with disease progression, and then convince the FDA of that.
So why am I posting this? Today the administration announced the "initial cancellation" (not sure what that means, suspension?) of all federal grants to Columbia University. $400MM in total. Part of that, we believe, is our little grant.
Columbia is just one site, we have 6 NIH funded sites. BUT, Columbia is the primary site and collects all the money and then gives it to the others. The other sites are BU, UAB, Nat'l Jewish, UNC, U of Utah. We fund Chicago and UCLA and Ireland.
This all happened hours ago so there aren't a lot of details out. I'll see our Columbia PI tomorrow at a fundraiser in Boston if she can get away. At the very least her sidekick (also MD/PhD) will be there so I can get more info.
Our foundation won't let the project die, we're two thirds through. But we may need to raise some money and fund it ourselves.
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@Piano-Dad said in Biomedical research takes a hit:
Columbia needs to grow a pair and fight back. Georgetown offers an example. These targeted budget cuts are illegal.
Excellent point, and not one I'm hearing many people make.
It seems that the standard response to all things Trump is fear, passivity, resignation, giving up....
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That’s going to be the response at Columbia too. They were told if they sue they’ll cancel student aid dollars next. So they’re going to cooperate.
I talked to someone in leadership there today who is concerned that it’s going to get worse before it gets better because the students are going to misbehave even more. (My words not hers)
