Legal battles over federal funding cuts raise questions about the future of research in Seattle
It was a regular monthly lunch meeting between the heads of the Puget Sound region’s largest medical research institutions. On Feb. 20, Dr. Thomas Lynch, president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, and Dr. Timothy Dellit, CEO of the University of Washington School of Medicine, ate bagel sandwiches from Rubenstein’s in Lynch’s office.
But the discussion was far from ordinary. The pair talked in-person for the first time about the Trump administration’s attempts to change the way the federal government funds biomedical research.
“Cancer research is done with federal funding, which is why the potential reduction in federal funding for science is so incredibly threatening to science throughout the country,” Lynch said in an interview with the Business Journal two days before his lunch meeting with Dellit.
The reduction that stresses Lynch the most is a 15% cap on the amount the federal government will reimburse for indirect costs, announced by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Feb. 7. A federal court issued an order to block any changes to NIH grant funding. But the legal combat has delayed new grant reviews and could have an economic impact downstream on the region’s health care industry.
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