‘We have not backed off’: Philadelphia-area funders are trying to trying to rescue medical research amid Trump funding cuts

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For decades, the Philadelphia Foundation has funded local community health work and research — everything from research into incurable diseases like Alzheimer’s to affordable housing.

It just recently started going through applications for one of their grant programs.

Instead of the usual 60 applications, it got 171, chief impact officer Philip Fitzgerald said.

“It was a shock to all of us,” he said.

He said he cannot say for sure why the foundation got three times the usual number of applications, but the amount of money it can give out in grants has not increased by three times, so the foundation has to think especially carefully about how to make the biggest impact.

The Trump administration has canceled hundreds of research grants from the National Institutes of Health that had already been vetted and approved, cutting more than a billion dollars in funding. This also means more competition for other sources of research funding, like from private foundations and charities.

One of Philadelphia Foundation’s programs, the Brody Family Medical Trust Fund fellowship, pays for local research into incurable diseases. Virologist Helena Winstone at the University of Pennsylvania recently got one of the fellowships and said it was a “massive relief” to know that her work will be funded for two years.

“A mix of relief and a little bit of guilt as well because I have colleagues … friends who are in the same position as me, but are really, really worried about their funding situation. I’ve had friends (whose) grants have been pulled,” she said. “There’s so many people who are being really, really screwed over by this situation.”

Winstone’s work is on the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, which is in the same family of viruses as the one that causes COVID-19. However, the MERS coronavirus has a much higher mortality rate — approximately 35% of victims have died — and there is no approved treatment.

The virus circulates among camels in Africa without causing outbreaks, and Winstone wants to figure out if there is a tipping point.

“We already know that they don’t replicate that well in human cells … but we want to know what’s the limit; what’s going to stop them from spilling over.”

She said that in the next two years, she will study how this virus behaves in human, bat and camel cells, and she hopes that will lead to treatments and pandemic preparedness.

The Philadelphia Foundation’s Brody Trust fellowship also paid for two years of research from neuroscientist Sophie Hill, who is at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania. She studies the genetic mutations that cause epilepsy. The hope is that understanding how the mutations and disease works can someday lead to a cure.

She said that after two years of research, she hopes to run her own lab to continue this work. But with the current instability over federal funding for science, “everything’s up in the air right now, maybe more than it was before.”

The National Science Foundation declined to comment for this story.

A spokesperson for the National Institutes of Health wrote in a statement in part that the agency is “carefully reviewing all grants to assure NIH is addressing the United States chronic disease epidemic.”

Some funders band together, amid fear of reprisals

Some foundations that fund research are coming together to try and make up for the shortfall in funding, said Alonzo Plough, chief science officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“There are a number of … in the moment, emergency responses to this first wave of the government’s destructive cutting of public health,” he said. “We’ve been able to operate very quickly because that’s … what philanthropy can do.”

For instance, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has programs to fund health equity research that the Trump administration has canceled.

“We have a very strong and aligned board that, if anything, wants to make sure that we are meeting this moment at the cutting edge of what needs to be done,” he said. “We have not backed off of any of our evidence-based work that shows that race and marginality of populations influences … their health outcomes. That’s evidence-based work. It’s good science.”

He added that the foundation is helping to archive and collect important public health and population data that federal agencies have recently given up on, and that they are not alone in this.

However, “given the politics of the moment, many, many funders are funding that effort anonymously because they are concerned about reprisals,” he said.

Cynthia Friend, president and CEO of the Kavli Foundation, which also funds science, called for philanthropic organizations to work together to meet the moment, in an op-ed in the journal Nature.

But Plough cautions that while foundations can put together funds to try and stem the loss of research and science, they cannot make up for the billions of dollars in research funding that the federal science agencies have traditionally paid for.