Foundation for U.S. Breakthroughs Feels Shakier to Researchers
Of her four canceled grants, Molly Franke, an epidemiologist and professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, worried most about a five-year randomized trial following roughly 160 teens and young adults living with HIV in Peru. The study tests a community-based support intervention that includes mental health support and healthcare liaisons who help them sign up for insurance, get government IDs, and enter treatment.
After the grant was canceled, that network of support was at risk of disappearing. “It was devastating,” she said. “These young people are often in very precarious social situations: Sometimes they don’t have adults in their lives; they’re struggling with mental health issues, substance abuse, or extreme poverty.”
Once University administrators committed to maintaining funding on a temporary basis, researchers breathed a small sigh of relief.
But Franke will still have to look for other backers to make sure the Peru study can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Her team tries to lighten the toll of disease in far-flung places because they believe “it’s the right thing to do,” she said. But the work is far from irrelevant to Americans, she noted.
“Infectious diseases know no borders,” Franke said. “And when we get drug-resistant tuberculosis in this country, we know how to treat it because of studies conducted elsewhere.”
In the spring of 2024, Kelsey Tyssowski — a research associate in organismic and evolutionary biology — received a grant of $130,255 through the NIH’s BRAIN Initiative for her work on the nervous systems of deer mice, in the hopes that it might shed light on ALS and other neurodegenerative disorders. (That may sound like a stretch, Tyssowski acknowledged, before pointing out that “skilled movement is the thing that people lose first with a lot of diseases.”)
But, as with nearly all other government grants to Harvard, those funds were finally revoked in early May.
Across 15 years in labs, Tyssowski said she’s been funded by government money “more often than not.” Her latest grant was supposed to serve as a bridge between her postdoc in the lab of Hopi Hoekstra and a tenure-track job, and a dedicated lab, probably on another campus.
“I may be the only person studying skilled movement, from this angle, right?” she said with a laugh. “I’d like to start my own lab, and train other people to do this. And if I can’t do that, all of the money and time and energy that’s gone into getting me to this point will have been almost completely wasted.”
Similar stories are playing out across Greater Boston and elsewhere in the nation’s research hubs. Grant data from the NIH shows that affected researchers at Harvard were working across a variety of medical frontiers, from cancer immunotherapy and stem cells to environmental health.
But researchers also stress that their work is not limited to labs on campus or in local hospitals.
At Harvard Medical School, the termination of 350 grants — totaling $230 million in annual funding — has also entailed the cancellation of over 100 “sub-awards.” Those are funds that pass through to partner institutions — in Harvard’s case, in 23 states and Washington, D.C. — that might have better access to animal species or lab resources.
Jonathan Abraham, associate professor of microbiology at HMS, won a grant to analyze mosquitos en route to a better understanding of Eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE. And it came with a sub-award for the University of Texas Medical Branch, as the world’s largest depository of insect-borne viruses.
Meanwhile, Stephanie Mohr won a similar sub-award for a team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, for a study of tick biology that hoped to shed light on Lyme disease. They were just a few months into a five-year grant when the termination hit.
The same goes for Franke’s study of HIV in youth, which involved a sub-award to the Peruvian branch of Partners In Health.
That study involved, she said, a commitment not just to patients but to the staff paid to care for them and to Peru’s Ministry of Health. The collapse of one grant had ripples of risk, even thousands of miles away.
“It affects the care, people’s livelihoods … and a trust that had taken 20 years to build,” Franke said. “That was what kept me up at night.”
Max Larkin is a Harvard Staff Writer. This article is published courtesy of the Harvard Gazette, Harvard University’s official newspaper.
