Last August, an 80-year-old woman entered the emergency room at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Although she was lucid, she suffered a stroke. Within minutes, doctors requested permission to extract the blood clot causing the stroke before any further brain damage occurred.
She hesitated. The procedure was part of a clinical trial and she heard about the federal freeze. Research grant to UCLA. She wanted to know: Is this research at risk, potentially affecting her treatment?
These concerns, he said, place an unnecessary burden on patients, who lose about 2 million nerve cells per minute as treatment is delayed. Jeffrey SaberHe is a neurologist and longtime stroke researcher.
“Worrying about federal funding is unnecessarily increasing the stress that patients are experiencing,” Saver said.
As the Trump administration lashes out at major universities, patients and researchers like Saver are caught in the middle. antisemitism and prejudiceIn an attempt to attract research funding extract concessions.
Scientists who have dedicated their lives to developing treatments for lung cancer, brain tumors and Alzheimer’s disease say scientific funding should not be politicized and warn that patients waiting for life-saving treatments will suffer the most. They also worry that cuts in funding due to legal challenges could discourage prospective scientists from entering the field and reduce opportunities for medical breakthroughs.
“You would have thought that stroke and Alzheimer’s disease and all of these diseases would affect Democrats and Republicans equally and everyone would support them,” Saber said. “The reason for the suspension does not seem to be related to the work we are doing.”
Last July, the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy $584 million frozen The Ministry of Justice is a university civil rights violated Jewish students during a pro-Palestinian protest. trump administration proposed an agreement That would require UCLA to pay a $1.2 billion fine and overhaul campus policies on admissions, hiring and gender-affirming health care to restore subsidies.
But the federal government plays a critical role in funding life-saving research that industry has little incentive to support. Saver said treatment discoveries made over the past 15 years have been “transformative” in stroke treatment. To keep the eight clinical trials going, Saver said he and other neurology faculty sought outside funding and agreed to pay cuts. But it was nearly exhausted before federal funding was restored.
In the emergency room, doctors told the stroke patient not to worry. Considering the need to study her special symptoms, they leveraged private donations to cover the procedure. She registered and received treatment.
Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been challenging President Donald Trump more directly as he builds national recognition, likened the president’s demands this way: rob.
And Newsom last week Threatened to take away “immediately” State funding for California universities sign an agreement Trump has said he would prioritize federal research funding to institutions that adhere to the government’s definition of gender, limit international students and change admissions policies. “California will not fund schools that sell out students, faculty, and researchers and abandon academic freedom,” Governor Newsom said in a statement.
In September, Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered frozen NIH grants to flow again, and UCLA researchers responded to a lawsuit first filed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and UC-San Francisco in June after the federal agency cut hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to UC campuses. I got caught up.
Some private institutions have recovered their funds by agreeing to pay hefty fines and change campus policies. columbia universityagreed to pay $200 million; Brown UniversityA settlement was reached for $50 million. Then last month a federal judge ruled It was illegal for the administration to cancel approximately $2.6 billion in subsidies to Harvard.
Still, researchers worry that this relief will only be temporary. Despite the district court’s reinstatement, the case brought by the UC researchers is still pending and could ultimately be decided in Trump’s favor. The White House I pledged to appeal. ruling restoring Harvard’s funding; Increased scrutiny It’s a school finance issue.
“We haven’t seen it all play out yet. A lot of scientists and researchers and people who run labs are cautious because they know the immediate future could be a little rough,” said Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School. “They should feel like this is a win, but it may be short-term.”
Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions about the potential harm to research while the funding is frozen or to criticism that they were misdirecting funds for potentially life-saving research.
In a statement about the administration’s campaign targeting anti-Semitism, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said, “We will not fund agencies that promote anti-Semitism, and we will use every tool at our disposal to ensure that agencies comply with the law.”
HHS spokeswoman Emily Hilliard said in a follow-up statement that the department has an “unwavering commitment to advancing groundbreaking biomedical research” and “continues to strategically invest in research that addresses today’s pressing challenges.”
The majority of UCLA’s funding is impacting basic science that is not directly related to patients but has the potential to significantly improve care. David Shackelford, a researcher studying new ways to inhibit the growth of treatment-resistant lung cancer, said he was getting closer to a potential breakthrough that could cure the disease, which kills nine in 10 patients within five years of diagnosis.
“I’m not used to having my science politicized,” Shackelford said. “It’s cancer. We shouldn’t even be discussing this.”
As the legal battle progresses, Democratic state lawmakers Considering issuing $23 billion worth of bonds Next year’s vote earmarks state funding for continued advancements in cancer, stroke and infectious disease research, among other scientific research. But the state bond, if approved by voters, would not come close to replacing the federal grants that traditionally provide the lion’s share of biomedical research.
For example, in 2024 alone, approx. $5.1 billion in NIH funding It flowed to California, $3.8 billion of which went to universities. And the proposed bond would be a broad, one-time fund that could pay for other research areas, such as climate change research, marine ecosystems or wildfire prevention.
UC President James Milliken said: The potential for larger federal cuts to the state’s second-largest employer would have ripple effects throughout California’s economy.
While other universities have sued the Trump administration, UC leaders have had “good faith conversations” with the Justice Department to negotiate a settlement, Milliken said.
S. Thomas Carmichael, a neurologist at UCLA, said about 55 grants totaling $23 million from the NIH have been frozen in his department at the David Geffen School of Medicine, including research on migraines, epilepsy and autism. He warned that as bad as the funding cuts are, the Trump administration has the ability to attack school accreditation, restrict visas for international students or initiate investigations.
“Having the federal government is essentially a complete and total mismatch of power,” Carmichael said. “You can’t win just by not giving in and not giving in on anything.”
Separately, in mid-September, a group of UC unions and faculty associations filed a lawsuit against the federal government, arguing that threats to research funding amounted to “financial coercion” to adopt campus policies that limit free speech. The hearing in this case is scheduled for December.
UCLA patient Brenda L. said she was devastated when she was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer through a scan in 2021 at age 70. After 18 months of taking Tagrisso, a drug considered the gold standard for treating this particular cancer, the tumor began to grow again. (Brenda declined to give her name because she had not disclosed her diagnosis to some family members.)
“I just felt like that was the end of my life,” said Brenda, now 75 and living in Bakersfield. She participated in a clinical trial and has been taking Tagrisso, along with another experimental drug, for two years. This combination almost halted the cancer’s progression.
“I’m a lucky person,” said Brenda, who has not been affected by the current trial. “Other patients should be given the same opportunity.”
This article was written by: KFF Health Newspublishing California HealthlineEditorially independent service California Health Care Foundation.
