TUESDAY, April 8, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- Federal cuts to funding could “decimate” medical research in the United States, delaying cures and costing countless lives, according to a leader in cancer research.

There’s been an overall freeze in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since the start of the Trump Administration, and it’s been “pretty disruptive to the field,” Alicia Zhou, CEO of the Cancer Research Institute, told HealthDay TV.

“I know, having talked to the scientists who are doing the research, that in a world where they're worried about having NIH funding, they are choosing to only do the less risky projects,” Zhou said. “The projects that are getting cut are the higher risk, higher reward projects.”

She continued: “Instead, researchers are now going to focus on the projects that they think will immediately result in a publication because those publications are important for them to show their productivity to their institutions.”

Such cutbacks might produce a shrug from the public, but Zhou noted that of 356 drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2010 to 2019, “354 of them had their origins with NIH-funded research.”

The NIH also has announced plans to cut indirect research funding by 15%. Right now, these cuts are suspended due to a court challenge, but if they go through they could throw a monkey wrench into ongoing research, Zhou said.

This indirect funding might seem non-essential, since it pays for basic facilities rather than for direct research, she said.

But they also pay for “the shared resources that folks use,” and not just janitors to clean up lab buildings, Zhou said.

Take lab mice as an example.

“If you're going to use mice for your experiment, you actually need a mouse facility,” Zhou said. “And that mouse facility has to be staffed with skilled workers who know how to handle those mice ethically and keep them alive so that you can do your research. All of those types of things are paid for by the indirect costs.”

Given the need for this support, a 15% cut is a “complete non-starter,” Zhou said.

“I think 15% decimates biomedical research in the United States as we know it today,” Zhou said.

She said she is particularly concerned about the impact that funding cuts will have on mRNA vaccine development for cancer.

“For us in the cancer space, mRNA vaccines are very promising,” Zhou said. “In fact, Moderna was developing a cancer vaccine before it pivoted to do COVID-19 vaccine work and infectious disease vaccine work during the pandemic.”

She noted that the underlying technology of mRNA vaccines plays an important role in cancer vaccine development.

”So I'm very worried that, for example, cancer vaccine research is going to get disproportionately impacted here,” Zhou said.

There also are concerns that funding cuts will cause a “brain drain” among budding young researchers. About 43% of postdoctoral researchers say their positions are at risk due to the cuts.

“When we talk to our scientific advisory council members, they have all told us that it is the young scientists, the training scientists, this is the generation of scientists that they're most worried about, because the uncertainty in the funding creates all of this uncertainty in the job market,” Zhou said.

“If you're early in your career, you're now having sort of an existential crisis about whether you should become a scientist or not, or if you should be pursuing an entirely different vocation,” she continued. “If we have too many people opting out of science, we will see a huge brain drain when it comes to 10 years from now when we're looking at the scientific workforce in the United States.”

The Cancer Research Institute, which is a nonprofit, plans to spend another $2.5 million this year to add 10 more postdoctoral fellowships to its program, Zhou said.

“This is our way of trying to help bolster that community and send a strong message to them that we do want there to be stability in this space,” Zhou said. “We do want them to stay in academic research. We don't want to see this brain drain happen, and I'm very proud to be able to say that we're stepping up in this area.”

More information

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has more on federal funding cuts to medical research.

SOURCE: HealthDay TV, April 8, 2025