Doctors and researchers across academic institutions fear that the National Institutes of Health’s decision to cut indirect research funding could stall medical progress and negatively affect patient care.
Indirect funding covers things like equipment, buildings, maintenance, utilities and support staff.
The funds aren’t used to directly support patient care but are crucial for basic operations at research institutions, said Dr. Theodore Iwashyna, a pulmonologist and critical care physician at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, paying for computers, whiteboards, microscopes, electricity, and janitors and staff who keep labs clean and organized.
The money supports “the research infrastructure,” said Iwashyna, who relies on NIH funding for research on chronic illnesses, including pneumonia, among the leading causes of hospitalizations in the U.S.
Iwashyna’s father had pancreatic cancer, and the care plan developed for him existed only because of research funded through organizations like the NIH.
“Everybody who comes to a place like Johns Hopkins, who comes to a place like Ohio State University to get a second opinion, the ability to do that depends on the research they’re doing,” he said.
Under the NIH’s new policy, which temporarily went into effect Monday, payments for indirect costs will be capped at 15%, down from around 27% or more — a reduction, Iwashyna said, that will cost jobs and prevent experts from researching important medical issues including cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
On Monday, however, a federal judge temporarily halted the new policy following a lawsuit from 22 state attorneys general.
The lawsuit claimed that the change will be “immediate and devastating” and will “result in layoffs, suspension of clinical trials, disruption of ongoing research programs, and laboratory closures.”
Dr. Robert Golden, the dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said indirect costs aren’t just administrative tasks, or
NIH cuts could stall medical progress for lifesaving treatments, experts say
