Ossoff, Georgia biomed industry slam Trump’s cuts to biomedical research

Georgia Life Sciences said that the immediate impact on university research would also cause downstream harm to the biomedical industry in the state, which it said funds more than 200,000 Georgia jobs, $50 billion of economic output, and implements agribusiness discoveries that help Georgia farmers.

“This disproportionately affects Georgia’s communities, where life sciences research and related jobs at institutions like Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, Augusta University and research centers such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Winship Cancer Institute and the Shepherd Center serve as a foundation for local economic growth,” the advocacy group said.

The group’s message was echoed by Ossoff in a news conference Thursday afternoon. “These cuts will have a devastating effect on cutting edge medical research in Georgia and across the country that saves lives, develops new cures, treatments and therapies to treat serious diseases,” Ossoff told reporters. “As we speak right now, it’s only the intervention of a federal court that is preventing these drastic across the board, cuts.”

The cuts were announced last weekend and almost immediately went into effect, even for grants already awarded. But a federal judge in Massachusetts has paused them and scheduled a hearing on the issue for Feb. 21.

Ossoff reeled off a handful of the NIH-funded projects underway, including research on Alzheimer’s disease and ovarian cancer at Emory University, on whooping cough in children at the University of Georgia and on lung cancer at the Morehouse School of Medicine. He urged the Trump administration to reverse the cuts.

NIH research funding — more than $40 billion a year nationwide — is the foundation of the nation’s global dominance in biomedical discoveries and research. While companies may develop their own products, those products are typically based on years or decades of preliminary research that was funded in part by NIH at universities. They also provide the projects that train young scientists who later go on to be professors, doctors or innovators in biomedical companies.

It’s a significant issue in Georgia, because leaders have worked to build the state’s standing as a hub of biomedical research. State leaders’ pitch to companies touts the state’s supply of highly trained workers, many of whom were trained at university laboratories and hospitals with NIH grant money.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has not weighed in publicly on the issue, and his spokesperson did not respond Thursday to queries on the issue. The University System of Georgia, led by Chancellor Sonny Perdue, has also not publicly responded to reporters’ questions. Perdue served as Trump’s secretary of agriculture during his first term in the White House.

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, like Kemp a Republican, did not join the lawsuit by Democratic-led states that paused the cuts.

Earlier this week, Carr’s spokesperson said the cuts would be good for research because by cutting overhead more money could go to research. Carr later added that he would work with “universities, hospitals and the Trump administration to protect the important research being done and help make government as efficient as possible.”

That comment echoes the Trump administration’s argument that the cuts were not to “actual research.”

The new policy caps a grant’s “indirect,” over overhead, costs at 15% of the “direct” costs. Indirect costs can include things like some support salaries, facilities, janitors, IT, security and hazardous waste handling. At major universities, that overhead cost can be 50% or more of the direct cost amount, adding up to a third of the total grant.

The Trump administration said it was just bringing federal overhead spending in line with the 15% that nonprofit charities’ grants often spend on overhead.

One official involved in nonprofit grants said that that reasoning was mistaken. Cara Altimus, a neuroscientist and managing director of the Science Philanthropy Accelerator for Research and Collaboration team at the Milken Institute, said that indirect cost is often defined differently for nonprofit grants and NIH grants.

One example, she said, was buying an MRI machine. Buying the machine might be part of the direct cost of a nonprofit charity’s grant, with little overhead cost associated with that acquisition. In contrast, she said, an NIH grant would require that the researcher already own the MRI machine, and would include indirect costs to house and run the machine and maintain it.

Christopher King, interim vice president for research at UGA, told faculty and staff this week that overhead costs were crucial and university leaders understood the importance of the cuts.

“Indirect costs … are essential to sustaining the research infrastructure that allows us to pursue groundbreaking discoveries,” King said in a written message. “We want to emphasize that we are already taking steps to advocate for our researchers and protect essential funding.”