UMass Chan Medical School faces shortfall of tens of millions of dollars in NIH funding

Leaders of UMass Chan Medical School say they've tallied the shortfall in federal funding to the school's scientists since President Trump took office. According to Chancellor Michael Collins, it's enough to imperil research across the institution.

The math shows UMass Chan hasn't received nearly $42 million in expected grants from the National Institutes of Health for the school's fiscal year that just ended. That includes grants for studies and related costs that were deemed "fundable" in the NIH review process but then stalled, Collins said.

The school is also facing a $94 million shortfall in anticipated federal funding for the current fiscal year, he said.

"The funding is not being advanced to the scientists who have dedicated their career to making a difference in the world. The Congress has appropriated the money. The administrators at the NIH are given the responsibility to do it," Collins said. "I think it's time the money flowed."

Collins said he had been "quite optimistic" the money would come, based on what he heard in a spring meeting with NIH director Jay Bhattacharya and what Bhattacharya said during testimony to a congressional committee last month.

"We repeatedly received assurances that the money from the NIH was going to be distributed rapidly and at the levels that the Congress had appropriated," Collins said.

WBUR reached out to NIH for comment and has not yet received a response.

The White House has proposed cutting $18 billion, or 40%, of the NIH's budget in the federal fiscal year that begins October 1. The president's discretionary budget request claims NIH "has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health."

Federal officials have pulled billions of dollars in funding from universities across the country. At Harvard, researchers lost millions for research in areas from breast cancer and fertility to antibiotic resistance. In June, a judge ordered the NIH to dispense billions of dollars in research funding the Trump administration had blocked.

Collins called it a "perilous moment for biomedical research" that demands people in the scientific world be assertive in advocating for the funding.

"There's nothing partisan about research funding," he said. "We're talking about research that's going to change the course of history of disease — that we're going to, you know, cure rare diseases for children, and ... we're going to find a way to make diabetes something that's a figment of the memory. We're going to deal with cancer."

A biomedical engineer at UMass Chan told WBUR earlier this year that she had frozen some of her lab's research related to pediatric brain cancer due to the federal funding issues.

UMass Chan has made up some of the shortfall via private donations, employee furloughs and layoffs, and a hiring freeze. It also admitted just 13 new doctoral candidates in its biomedical sciences school for the upcoming academic year, according to a school spokesperson. It rescinded 87 offers of admission.

Collins is concerned about an "enormous brain drain" if the situation doesn't change.

"We're going to lose [scientists] to foreign countries, and the prestige that is, today, the American biomedical research enterprise will be greatly diminished," he said. "And to me, that would be a crying shame."