NIH Grant Cuts Have Disrupted 383 Clinical Trials With 74,311 Patients

You know the saying it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye? Well, under the Trump administration this year, there’s been a whole lot of premature termination going on, including the delaying and terminating of many National Institutes of Health grants well before the work was finished. And since researchers use such NIH grant funding to study health and the prevention and treatment of medical conditions, you’ve got to wonder how many someones around the U.S. will end up losing eyes…or limbs, other body parts or even lives because of all these NIH grant cuts in 2025. And in the words of Adele, could that be someone like you?

NIH Grant Cuts Disrupted 118 Cancer Clinical Trials

Well, a new research letter just published in JAMA Internal Medicine has revealed what may be just the tip of the iceberg. But it’s a big tip. NIH grant funding cuts from February 28 through August 15 have already disrupted at least 383 clinical trials that had 74,311 patients enrolled. That included the termination of 118 trials studying cancer in some way, 97 trials studying infectious diseases and 140 trials that were testing some kind of new treatment for some kind of medical condition. That’s kind of a lot of real stuff that’s been affected. And a lot of it could affect you if you do in fact have human body parts.

A research team based at Harvard Medical School (Vishal R. Patel, MD, MPH, Michael Liu, MD, MPhil and Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD) conducted this analysis. They identified the trials by searching through the NIH ExPORTER database, which listed 11,008 clinical trials that were supposed to receive NIH funding during the five-and-a-half month time period of interest. At least, 3.5% of those clinical trials ended up losing funding—I say “at least” because the cuts to NIH grants didn’t necessarily end on August 15. That just happened to be the date the research team decided to wrap up the analyses.

The research team chose February 28 as the beginning of the study period because that was the D-day for the NIH cuts—as in the day researchers around the U.S. began saying “doh?” That day it was announced that all NIH-funded research activities would be reviewed and cut if they did not align with the Executive Orders from U.S. President Donald Trump and the new NIH priorities. It was also a very DOGE-y time because that was when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—otherwise known as DOGE—was roaming the NIH campus and choosing what NIH funds and personnel to cut as well.

NIH Grant Cuts Affected Clinical Trials And Patients In Different Ways

This Harvard Medical School team analysis was just a tip of the iceberg thing in part because it focused only on clinical trials, a specific type of research study. A clinical trial recruits and enrolls human subjects—often patients with some kind of medical condition—to then test potential treatments on to determine the potential efficacy and side effects. These treatments can range from already-on-the-market treatments where more information is needed on their efficacy or side effects to totally new medications, medical devices or approaches that are not yet U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved to be widely available. Many times participating in clinical trials is the only way that a patient can get access to an experimental treatment. This could be of desperate need for the patient if he or she is facing a life-threatening condition like cancer.

Therefore, grant funding cuts that disrupt a clinical trial can have immediate direct and profound effects on patients in a bad way. It could even make the death-by-a-thousand-cuts saying oh-so-real. Imagine having cancer that has resisted all standard treatments. You might have to enroll in a clinical trial as a last ditch effort to stay alive. What then happens if that trial is stopped or delayed in any way because someone at a desk somewhere decided to cut the NIH funding just because it had some kind of deemed no-no word in it? In the words of that Ed Sheeran song, how would you feel?

Or what if you had to enroll in a clinical trial because you normally wouldn’t be able to afford a given treatment for cancer? Cancer treatments aren’t usually like that seven-pound container of Nutella sold at Costco and instead can get pretty darn expensive. Cancer treatments can be downright unaffordable if you are one of the over 25 million people in the U.S. who do not have any health insurance. And even if you do have what you think is good insurance, you might be shocked at the Cirque du Soleil-esque contortions that insurance companies may perform to avoid paying for treatments once you need them. Your lack of billionaire status could then be a life-threatening pre-existing condition for you if the right clinical trial is no longer running due to NIH grant cuts.

Even When NIH Grant Cuts Are Reversed The Delays Can Have Bad Effects

Now, the analysis did show that over 36% of the clinical trials that got disrupted by NIH grant cuts did eventually get completed. But running a clinical trial isn’t like microwaving a Hot Pocket or trying to get through episodes of “Nobody Wants This” on Netflix. You can’t just turn a clinical trial off and then on again to just pick up where you left things.

I’ve already mentioned the possibility of patients with cancer or other life-threatening conditions being in a race against time to get treatment. But even when there isn’t a day-by-day, week-by-week or month-by-month urgency for the patients in a clinical trial to get treatment, delays can make things very tough for everyone involved. Since a lot can be going on in a hospital or other type of health care facility, space and resources for a clinical trial may need to be booked months or even years in advance. If you thought that getting a court for pickleball is hard, try reserving time and space for a clinical trial. If a window of time for running a clinical trial is missed, it could be a while before another window becomes available again.

Moreover, medical researchers around the U.S. often have to double as small business owners. They typically have to maintain a staff, paying their entire salaries and beenfits through NIH grant funding. Any gap in funding can be like telling a business owner, “Yeah, let’s stop all your customers for a month or two or more, and see how you do.” Any gap in grant funding could lead to researchers having to lay off personnel. And it’s not as if those personnel go into a drawer or locker and say, “Let me know when you can rehire me.” If a grant that was terminated or delayed is somehow restored, the researchers may then need to take a lot of time and effort to recruit completely new personnel and train them. Plus, there are numerous other logistics issues with stopping and then starting a clinical trial again.

The Study Showed Only A Fraction Of The Impact That NIH Grant Cuts Will Have

Again, the JAMA Internal Medicine research letter showed no more than the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the impact of the NIH grant cuts in part because the analyses stopped at August 15, which ironically was National Relaxation Day. But those running clinical trials certainly haven’t been able to relax since that day. It’s not clear how many more clinical trials will end up getting delayed or terminated with the implementation of the new NIH multiyear funding policy, Trump signing an Executive Order that gives his administration more control over awarding NIH grants in ways that can bypass the scientific peer review process and the Trump administration threatening different universities individually to withhold their funding unless the universities comply with demands.

Another reason why the impact of NIH grant cuts are probably a lot more “Titanic” than the tip of the iceberg shown by the research letter is that the analyses again focused only on clinical trials. They did not cover the many other types of research studies supported by NIH funding. These studies range from the laboratory and type of stuff to the tracking-what’s-happening-across populations epidemiological studies to the lets-use-the-computer-to-simulate-different-possibilities sort of like how Tony Stark figured out time travel in the Avengers:Endgame movie. To figure out how best to prevent or treat diseases, you need combinations of different studies.

Now, to get funded for any of these studies, the research teams already had to write out in their applications how their proposed studies would impact society. So, if you want to see how terminating any of the studies would impact you and the rest of society, you could start by reading what was written. You’ll find that many, many NIH grants have been funding stuff that really matters to you and others with human body parts.

Additionally, a lot of the impact of the NIH grant cuts in 2025 will take some time to manifest—in some cases months, in other cases years. For example, what if a terminated study could have led to treatment for a disease that you will end up getting in the future? You could end up pointing to what happened in 2025 and saying, “bleep” because the termination of a grant was the reason you didn’t end up living a longer and healthier life. Yep, as the Back to the Future, Avengers: End Game, Hot Tub Time Machine and X-Men: Days of Future Past movies should have taught everyone, making big changes without thinking their ramification through can be like abruptly shoving a marmot down your pants. Both could end up biting you in the end.

More analyses like the one just published in JAMA Internal Medicine will be needed. Everyone should be fully aware of the impact on everyone that all these NIH grant cuts are having. In other words, it’s important to keep a close eye on what’s happening to medical research funding right now, lest someone loses an eye or other body parts as a result.