Trump surrenders in the war on cancer

When my mom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, she was given a chemotherapy that had proven so effective at the time that they couldn’t predict how much longer it would extend her life since not enough people had died yet.

Progress in the war on cancer in the last 20 years has been amazing. Innovations like CAR-T cells and mRNA vaccines are the culmination of years of painstaking research and are finally finding their way into clinics and patients.

But in his petulant war on universities, Trump is calling a halt to this life-saving progress:

“THE NEWS CAME ON JULY 31, when the Trump administration informed UCLA it was suspending roughly 800 research grants that, together, are worth more than $500 million. The freeze has already disrupted operations, Shackelford told me, leaving him (and countless other UCLA researchers) scrambling to figure out how to stretch their budgets or quickly find outside funding.

 

“Shackelford said his team has had a series of recent breakthroughs on imaging, including one that could lead to a publishable paper by year’s end—and, just maybe, some clinical trials in the first few months after that. But the longer the freeze stays in place, he said, the more likely he will have to slow down the studies, downsize the laboratory’s operations or even shut down the project altogether.

 

“As it is, he noted, the time he’s spending on funding questions is time he can’t spend on the research itself. “What keeps me up at night is that we have some great momentum going and now it’s being halted,” Shackelford said.

 

“Trump’s move against UCLA is the latest in a series of funding suspensions that have targeted individual schools like Columbia, which eventually won back some of its funding with a $200 million settlement paid to the government, and Harvard, which is reportedly negotiating a deal involving a promise to spend $500 million. Trump has told UCLA it will have to pony up $1 billion if it wants a restoration of its funds, according to the New York Times.

 

“And Trump hasn’t simply been using federal research funds as leverage against individual institutions. He’s also been wrecking the entire government apparatus for supporting scientific research—by purging senior leaders and career staff at the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies, and canceling or withholding hundreds of millions (and probably billions) of dollars in previously awarded grants.

 

“There may be more to come. Trump’s budget for next year calls for reducing NIH funding by 37 percent, and reducing funds for the National Cancer Institute (which is a division of NIH) by the same magnitude. “If implemented,” the American Cancer Society Action Network warned, “these cuts will deal a devastating blow to cancer patients and their families, and the United States could lose its global competitive edge in biomedical research.”

 

Click the link for details on the kind of research Trump is killing. 

The US used to be the world’s leader in biomedical research. Trump aims to change that.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark/p/research-trump-cuts-ucla-nih-nci-funding-grants-war-on-cancer?r=2133ns&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email


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