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Major Alzheimer’s disease research centers across the country face a $65m funding gap amid a Trump administration-imposed delay, with at least one struggling to retain highly trained staff. Although courts have ruled a government-wide funding freeze is illegal, the administration has managed to delay research funding by canceling scientific meetings and failing to publish forthcoming meetings in the Federal Register, both which are legally required.
As the Trump administration seeks to reshape government and cut costs in line with its priorities, scientific institutions, and in particular the $48bn-budgeted National Institutes of Health (NIH), have come under attack. Funding delays have affected nearly every research field, from pediatric cancer to dementia, as part of a multi-pronged strategy of draconian cuts.
For Alzheimer’s research, the stakes are high. The degenerative condition affects 6.7 million Americans with diagnoses expected to double by 2060. Although it most often affects older adults, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not consider Alzheimer’s a normal part of aging. At least $65m slated for 14 of the nation’s 35 Alzheimer’s disease research centers is now in limbo. Funding for all 14 centers is expected to run out on 30 April.
Ann D Cohen, an associate professor of psychiatry and an Alzheimer’s disease researcher is working to “stop the bleeding” and retain her staff: “Our clinicians and our staff are really highly trained, highly skilled people, and to lose them would be devastating” said Cohen. She is based at the University of Pittsburgh’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “You don’t just pull those kinds of skill sets out of anyone in the general population.”
Pittsburgh’s center alone houses clinical trials, a bank of 1,769 brains, 965 positron emission tomography (PET) scans, 5,000 blood samples and longitudinal data on 6,000-plus patients – altogether accounting for decades of research at an institution that has been funded continuously since 1984.
Another of the administration’s cost-cutting initiatives involves slashing “indirect costs” by $4bn. Cohen’s lab has a 59% indirect cost rate. Part of that cost is related to the maintenance of freezers with tissue samples – and not just the electricity to run them. Their contents are so precious that at all times a member of staff wears a pager that alerts in the event of a malfunction.
Government cost-cutting measures come ahead of an expected push to extend Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly enriched the wealthy.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
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