UCLA Faces $500M Federal Grant Suspension

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Around $500 million in federal grants have been suspended from UCLA, halting research in cancer, heart disease, diabetes, strokes, PTSD and fighting antibiotic-resistant infections.

In August, a federal judge ordered the restoration of 114 National Science Foundation grants. However, grants from the National Institutes of Health remain suspended. Researchers have since been struggling to maintain experiments and keep staff. Many researchers feel a sense of uncertainty as funding is up in the air.

Physician scientist and chair of the Neurology Department at UCLA, Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, told LAist his department lost about $23 million meant for staff salaries and experiments among other critical needs. He also claimed that the suspension of funding has disrupted several projects, many of which are aimed at treating Alzheimer’s, stroke and Parkinson’s patients.

Researchers were also working on a new drug meant to assist with learning and memory function for those with stroke and dementia damage. Carmichael estimated that, if all went well, the drug was on a five-year timeline from discovery to clinical trials. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.

“We’re at the stage where, hey, this works,” Carmichael said. “It does something different in these diseases that we haven’t been able to do. So now we need to replicate it. And now we need to do a lot of the studies that show what dose can be given. Is there toxicity? Those kinds of things.”

The Neurology Department will be able to cover salaries and minimal research efforts for the next three months using money meant for high-risk, high-reward projects that NIH funding may not cover. It is not clear what will occur after this three month period. Some researchers have been using personal funds, but this is also limited.

It is possible that researchers could lose more than a year’s worth of experiments.

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Not only would losing staff negatively affect lab research, but growing uncertainty and instability could also drive many out of the field. That, in turn, could disrupt industries such as pharmaceuticals and biotech, which depend on this research. Some even worry it could collapse entirely.