The NIH indirect cost caps will kneecap biomedical research–and everyone will pay the price
This reckless policy will gut scientific innovation, drive researchers out of the US, devastate healthcare, and cause economic collapse.
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The NIH indirect funding caps will kneecap biomedical research–and cause irreparable harm to America
On Friday February 7, 2025, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it was going to immediately adjust “indirect cost” funding to a universal 15% rate, sparking alarm in those of us familiar with how biomedical research works.
I’ve worked in academia and industry while academic labs depend directly on NIH funding, industry depends on it too. Without basic discovery research done in academic labs, biomedical developments don’t progress–and all of us suffer.
While there are currently legal challenges in process, if this is allowed to go into effect, a cap on indirect costs by the NIH will not only cripple US biomedical research, it will also make us sicker, worsen our healthcare, and cause serious economic damage to our entire country. (for context, these rates typically range between 40-70%, depending on the type of institution)
Indirect costs aren’t “just paying administrators” – they are the backbone of biomedical research institutions
(Now, I am going to write this in the context of biomedical research, knowing that there are other research projects that fall under NIH purview)
If you’ve ever written a grant proposal, you know that you have to write a detailed budget of the direct costs of the project you’re trying to sell to get grant funding. This includes salaries for you and your direct research team, research supplies (reagents, chemicals, media, etc), laboratory equipment that will be housed in your personal lab, costs for travel to research conferences and colloquia. Simply, these are the things that are directly associated with the specific project you are detailing within your grant proposal.
But there are other costs associated with doing that research, right? Your lab is going to be somewhere.
That somewhere needs electricity, temperature control, ventilation, emergency generators, security, environmental and hazardous waste precautions.
You need access to computers, software, data analysis tools, journal subscriptions, libraries, animal facilities, veterinary care personnel, microscopy and imaging core facilities, genomics cores, flow cytometry cores, pathology facilities, clinical tissue banks….and yes, we do also need administrative support, finance teams, and legal teams.
Scientific research is made possible by more than just the direct costs on a grant.
All of these other things fall into the indirect costs–officially called Facilities and Administrative Costs (F&A). I guess a lot of people left out the facilities bit when talking about how this is unimportant, and also don’t realize that “administrative” means a lot more than a physical person serving as an administrator.
Scientists can’t do research without a working lab, with working incubators and cold storage and buildings that house them. We can’t do animal research or human subjects research without institutional review boards and ethics committees. We can’t do anything these days without the internet, IT infrastructure, and–for a lot of our projects–powerful computers.
These indirect costs aren’t slush funds being secreted away by some University CEO. Cutting these funds when most institutions can’t eat the difference means those research projects will no longer exist. That means those researchers won’t exist. Their staff won’t exist. The data they would have generated won’t exist. You see where I’m going with this, right?
If universities can’t cover the overhead costs of supporting research, their options are: lose money on every research project and grant they accept, or turn down grants and researchers bringing them and cut their overall research program. One guess as to which option is going to happen.
Capping NIH indirect cost funding is a disaster for every single human being.
People who are seemingly in favor of this echo talking points about how this will “get rid of useless administrators and bureaucracy,” but that isn’t what it will actually do.
This policy–if allowed to go into effect–will eviscerate scientific research and development from the inside. Universities won’t have resources to support researchers, less funding for scientists means projects will be halted, progress for biomedical development will slow, and you will have access to fewer life-saving medical interventions.
Some of the obvious consequences include:
US brain drain: good scientists will be forced to leave their roles and potentially the country entirely to move to countries that are investing in scientific research and development
Medical research and breakthroughs will slow as a result of lost funding and reduced workforce
Biotech and pharmaceutical developments will be hindered as they rely on early discovery work done at NIH-funded labs
Public universities will be disproportionately harmed, widening inequities in STEM
Education quality will deteriorate as researchers who have lost their labs will no longer be teaching at the universities either
The US will no longer be a leader in biomedical innovation, allowing countries like China to overtake us as a scientific and economic leader
This isn’t hyperbole–it is the consequence of doing something without thinking about the societal impacts.
Industry can’t just take over the role of the NIH or NIH-funded research projects
Some people argue that industry can (and should) just pick up the slack, since they’re for-profit and they make lots of money, right?
The problem? People who don’t understand how biomedical science works don’t realize that industry research does not focus on the early discovery work done in academia that dissects mechanisms of disease or physiological phenomena.
That’s where the NIH-funded and university research is critical.
I’ve worked in both sectors–and the type of research done in each is different. In an academic lab, your area of focus is incredibly niche–granular, down to understanding individual genes, proteins, protein interactions–and how they might play a role in disease.
Industry–here, used as a term to encompass biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors (related, but different) don’t focus on the early-stage studies, especially those related to topics that don’t have a clear path to a solution. They focus efforts on developing treatments, cures, diagnostics, and technologies.
Why is that? Well, because development pipelines have incredible costs associated with them–and academic research and NIH-based government funding couldn’t support them. Even just the laboratory infrastructure needed to manufacture therapeutics are at scales people in academic research can’t fathom.
The amount of auxiliary work needed to be done to bring a therapeutic or even an FDA-approved diagnostic test to commercialization is incredibly expensive and time consuming–because there are so many regulatory steps involved. There are so many layers of legal compliance issues involved that don’t exist in academic research.
Industry simply doesn’t have the ability or the resources to divert from doing all of those things to also pick up exploratory biology research that will be gutted by NIH indirect funding caps.
Without NIH-funded research laying the groundwork, there would be no medications, therapeutic development, or medical innovations.
The problem is, we all depend on NIH-funded research, whether you realize it or not.
I’m going to use an example that I think most people might be familiar with–and one that I have a degree of relation to.
Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) was the very first FDA-approved cell therapy for certain leukemias. It is a biological treatment where a patient's own immune cells (T cells, in this case) are genetically engineered to better recognize cancer cells in their body. This is called CAR-T therapy (chimeric antigen receptor), and this development has literally changed the game in cancer treatment.
While today this treatment is manufactured by Novartis, it started with academic research at UPenn in Carl June’s lab (if you’ve heard his name, this is why–he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize the year another academic researcher, James Wilson, received it for similar work in CAR T).
The June lab–a big and bustling lab filled with incredible scientists: grad students, lab techs, postdocs, visiting professors–and more–have been working on understanding how we can harness our own immune systems to better target, seek, and destroy cancer for decades. Not just for cancer either–also for latent viral infections like HIV. In fact, in my current full-time job, I’ve collaborated with the Riley lab at the Penn Center for Cellular Immunotherapies to publish a paper on this very thing–developing CAR T cell therapies for HIV.
Anyway, I digress.
But I use this to illustrate the fact that NIH-funded research and labs and industry rely on each other.
Kymriah would not exist and would not be saving countless lives, if not for the NIH-funded research done at the June lab and others. But academia can’t scale and manufacture treatments like industry can.
So once he and colleagues demonstrated the science was sound and this was a viable treatment path, they sold the technology to Novartis so that they could commercialize it–meaning do all of the extensive clinical trials, figuring out how to scale up manufacturing, how to actually make a product that will be stable, safe, deliverable, conduct all the safety studies, adhere to all the regulatory requirements that's involved, submit to FDA for approval, and more.
I’m sure you can understand why an academic lab within a large academic ecosystem isn’t able to do that. And I’m sure you can understand why a biotech or pharmaceutical company can’t also do all the exploratory work that happens before research gets to this phase.
That’s why it is essential for both of these arms of science. Without the public funding by the NIH for those facilities costs, CAR-T therapies wouldn’t exist. Many immunotherapies wouldn’t exist. Gene therapies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, RPE65-mutation-associated retinal dystrophy, sickle cell disease, beta thalassemia…these wouldn’t exist.
Luxturna–a gene therapy for RPE65-mutation-associated retinal dystrophy made by Spark Therapeutics–was discovered and developed at a laboratory at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHoP) by Dr. Katherine High.
The types of research that will be impacted the most by NIH funding caps? Research focused on rare, complex, and stigmatized medical conditions.
The high risk research will be the first to go. That’s because–they’re high risk. That means a lab might get a project funded for 5 years, only to determine at the end of it that there isn’t a mechanism they’ve identified, or there isn’t enough preliminary research to submit for the next grant proposal. Academic institutes take a chance on these types of projects because in rare instances–they lead to a breakthrough.
This means research for:
Cancers, of all types, especially those that are more challenging to treat (like solid tumors) or are more rare.
Neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, which are complex, multifactorial, and expensive to study.
Rare diseases–those that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the US, but are incredibly serious, often fatal–cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), sickle cell disease, and more. Many of these also are inherited and disproportionately affect kids.
Autoimmune and other complex inflammatory diseases. Understanding the underlying pathologies and mechanisms of diseases that involve our more complicated organ system (the immune system) require an incredible amount of fundamental exploration. Without that being done at NIH-funded labs who can tease apart singular cellular pathways, new treatments and interventions will cease to exist.
Mental health and psychiatric conditions–just like these other complex medical conditions, the majority of discovery research in these spaces happens in NIH-funded labs. That includes screening for and identifying new treatments to manage depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, and more.
Infectious diseases and vaccines too.
Contrary to claims you see online, vaccines are the least profitable and smallest arm of most pharmaceutical companies that manufacture vaccines. That’s for a few reasons:
The nature of vaccines: they’re typically a one-and-done (one being the vaccine dosage regimen) with the goal of preventing an entire medical condition.
Their development, manufacture, and regulatory processes are incredibly complex and as a result, incredibly expensive to bring a vaccine to market.
Vaccines are vastly less profitable than medications that people take regularly through the course of their life–or at least through large segments of someone’s life. Things like sildenafil (that’s Viagra or Cialis), Lipitor (atorvastatin), Eliquis (apixaban), and even your Botox injections. Way more profitable. Profit margins for vaccines are between 10% and 40%, compared to other medications which often have margins up to 90%.
Plus, vaccines are developed only after we understand the biology of the pathogen and the immune response to the pathogen. Both of these inform the design of the vaccine. New vaccine technologies, like mRNA vaccines, are also born in academic research in–you guessed it–NIH-funded labs.
Without NIH funding for facilities and indirect costs, academic research will collapse. And that means industry development will collapse. And all of us will suffer the consequences of no longer seeing the development of improved scientific and medical innovation.
The hypocrisy of RFK Jr and his MAHA mouthpieces like Calley Means claiming that scientists and healthcare providers are “ignoring” chronic diseases when 1) that’s objectively false and 2) these NIH cuts will disproportionately affect chronic and progressive diseases…well, I’ll let you finish that sentence.
The NIH funding cap is a terrible economic policy too.
If policymakers claim they’re trying to “save money” this is one of the absolute worst ways to do it—and they either don’t understand how biomedical research works or their intentionally ignoring it. Here are some statistics:
Every dollar invested into NIH funding generates more than double in economic activity. Specifically? Every $1 in NIH funding leads to $2.46 in the economy. In one year (2023) that was $92.9 billion dollars into our national economy.
How does that work, you might ask?
A few ways. First: the more basic research that happens, the more potential breakthroughs happen, the more investment happens in industry. Second: NIH-funded research projects create jobs: jobs at research institutes, jobs to support people who work at those research institutes, and auxiliary jobs within communities that house research institutes.
An example: Rochester, Minnesota is home to the Mayo Clinic.
The entire city of Rochester is driven by the Mayo Clinic (I actually learned this when I was working there one summer in 2015). Because of how large a medical and research center Mayo is, it has created a huge auxiliary economy in Rochester.
Mayo Clinic itself is the largest employer because of the amount of research they do there through NIH-funded grants. But, because of how many people work there, it has also driven a bustling economy in this unlikely location.
There’s a huge hospitality industry: shopping centers, restaurants, and hotels. Cutting-edge research going on there means hosting conferences: more economic stimulus through event hosting. Housing and real estate infrastructure grows as a result, stimulating multiple jobs sectors. And early research at Mayo leads to spin-out start-up biotechs, creating more jobs and economic growth.
Without the Mayo Clinic? This wouldn’t exist. And the Mayo Clinic wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for NIH funding, including the full amount of the indirect costs they need to keep their facilities operating.
If the NIH cuts indirect costs, no one will save money. Costs will be transferred from the government to you. To your kids who are going to school. To consumers. In the long-term, it will cause a potential economic recession.
Public universities will be impacted the most by NIH funding cuts.
Private universities and Ivy Leagues, just like rich trust-fund families, might have a cache of funds, but state schools? They don’t have huge endowments. That means they will be disproportionately impacted without liquid finances to absorb the immense costs they just had funding pulled out from under. Specifically, rural and and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) will be the most negatively impacted. This means fewer opportunities for the less privileged, less diversity in education and research, and widening the inequities within STEM fields.
The NIH cap on indirect funds is one of the worst policies of a long list of terrible policies.
The Trump Administration and the “MAHA” movement is anything but concerned about health. Their actions demonstrate this time and again. F&A indirect costs aren’t “bureaucratic bloat” — they are essential for any research institution to function. Cutting funding will cripple scientific, education, and healthcare progress in the US.
We shouldn’t be cutting NIH funding, we should be expanding it. The fact that people view biomedical research–something that is the literal reason you have all of the creature comforts you do–as an “expense” to cut corners on instead of an investment that benefits humanity is truly saddening.
But what’s worse? The predictable damage this will cause. Not just immediately, but for the next 10, 20, 30, even 100 years. If the US drives out scientific minds and hampers medical innovation, we may never be able to recover.
Now, more than ever, we all must join in the fight for science.
Thank you for supporting evidence-based science communication. With outbreaks of preventable diseases, refusal of evidence-based medical interventions, propagation of pseudoscience by prominent public “personalities”, it’s needed now more than ever.
More science education, less disinformation.
- Andrea
ImmunoLogic is written by Dr. Andrea Love, PhD - immunologist and microbiologist. She works full-time in life sciences biotech and has had a lifelong passion for closing the science literacy gap and combating pseudoscience and health misinformation as far back as her childhood. This newsletter and her science communication on her social media pages are born from that passion. Follow on Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and Facebook, or support the newsletter by subscribing below:
Andrea - please keep the fight going. Your actions are so appreciated. And yes, the indirect funding caps will end up badly, and I won't hesitate to say that many more people will die if it continues (how many more Americans died because of the monster in the White House the first time?). I would like to comment on a few points. First - let's send some "love" to the industrial scientists - the medicinal chemists, the high throughput screeners, cell biologists, biomedical engineers, etc. They also do research and invent and develop many of our medications and medical devices. This headline, "Without NIH-funded research laying the groundwork, there would be no medications, therapeutic development, or medical innovations" is a bit overreaching, but the gist of the message is right. We were all trained in academia, but learned scientific discipline and reproducibility in industry. The lack of reproducibility in academic research (maybe a future topic) is abysmal. Second - if we, as taxpayers, are paying for this research, we shouldn't be punished with exorbitant prices on the medications that come out of the work. I don't know how to fix this problem, but maybe we should revisit Bayh-Dole. I remember a conversation about 30 years ago with an academic researcher who had many discoveries and he said that his job was to use the "free" money he gets to do research and to make those discoveries available to the public. Finally, and this is off topic - every time I think of RFK Jr, the term, hormesis, pops into my head. It's a fascinating phenomenon and I bet he doesn't know what it means - he should. Thanks for all you are doing!
Thank you for continuing to speak up in a way that captures the concerns of so many people! Having grown up in Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic is a brilliant example. “Outstate” Minnesota is full of small towns that are not thriving, while Rochester continues to be a hub. Like you, I fear that we will experience a “brain drain” that will seriously compromise our ability to provide quality, evidence-based care. Keep writing, and know that your readers will continue speaking up and spreading the word. Your newsletter is a labor of love, but we appreciate your work! (And readers, keep clicking “restack” to make it more visible.)