How NIH Funding Cuts are Affecting Academic Research

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Michael Liu, medical student and researcher at Harvard Medical School, discussed a recent study on National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant cuts. Among other notable findings, the study highlighted that 20% of terminated grants were early career training grants, which are crucial for maintaining biomedical research pipelines. Liu also highlighted how the cuts have disproportionately affected institutions nationwide and compromised ongoing clinical trials, particularly those involving marginalized populations.

ACT: What stood out the most to you from the results and what are your greatest takeaways from them?

Liu: I think there are three big things, three biggest takeaways. The first one, the top line findings, that during our study period, we found that there were about 700 grants that were terminated by the NIH and it totaled to about $1.8 billion. This is a large number, but it is proportionally a relatively small amount of all NIH funding. It's about 3% of all NIH funding. However, these cuts weren't felt equally across all institutes, and what we saw was exactly that, that there were some institutes that were hit harder than others, and we found that, for example, the largest grant cuts in terms of absolute amounts was at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about $500 million, and then when you look at the proportion of all funding that each institute administers, it's about a 30% cut at the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, and that was the institute that was affected the greatest, so that was probably my first takeaway.

The second one is that, anecdotally, a lot of people, I think at least myself and my team, came in thinking that these cuts would occur at some of the more private institutions, some of the more elite coastal institutions that we think about. We are part of those institutions here, so that was kind of our a priori assumption, but we actually found that institutions of all stripes were affected. These were the private institutions that you think about; Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, and those also include flagship public universities as well such as the University of California, San Francisco. Really across the United States, we're seeing really, really drastic cuts, and no one is spared by it.

The third thing that I will say, and this is kind of deeply personal to both me and a lot of the other researchers on the team. We're all early career researchers, and we were struck by the fact that about one in five or 20% of grants that were terminated were classified as early career training grants. These are the F series grants, T grants, K grants, and these are really important grants for several reasons, which I'm happy to talk about, but they are essential for maintaining the pipeline of biomedical clinical research in the United States. The fact that they were being cut, perhaps disproportionately, was really, really striking to us.