Health
N.I.H. Bans New Funding From U.S. Scientists to Partners Abroad
The National Institutes of Health will no longer allow American scientists to direct its funding to research partners overseas, casting doubt on the future of studies on subjects including malaria and childhood cancer.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the N.I.H., announced the policy on Thursday, the same day Dr. Matthew J. Memoli, the principal deputy director, blasted these so-called subawards in an email obtained by The New York Times.
“If you can’t clearly justify why you are doing something overseas, as in it can’t possibly be done anywhere else and it benefits the American people,” Dr. Memoli wrote, “then the project should be closed down.”
The new restrictions, which will apply to domestic subawards as well in the future, come amid deep reductions in N.I.H. funding and the freezing of federal grants at many top universities, along with executive orders seeking to reshape the nation’s scientific agenda.
On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order restricting a type of experimentation that can make pathogens more dangerous to humans, and ending support for the so-called gain-of-function research in countries like China.
Researchers funded by N.I.H. grants have historically used subawards to facilitate international collaborations, which are essential for studying conditions like childhood cancer or illnesses like malaria and tuberculosis that are not prevalent in the United States.
The subawards are legal and financial agreements made between the grant recipients and their overseas partners. The practice is used throughout the federal government and is not unique to the N.I.H.
But it has come under fire in recent years because of lax reporting and tracking of funds. After a critical report by the Government Accountability Office in 2023, the N.I.H. put stricter monitoring requirements in place.
Advocates for scientific and medical research said that as science has become more complex, collaborative initiatives that draw participants and scientists from around the world have become more critical.
“Competitive science requires a team approach,” said Dr. E. Anders Kolb, chief executive of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. “There’s no one lab or institution or investigator that has all of the tools necessary to solve the very complex questions that we’re asking.”
Many of these studies require a large number of subjects. For example, as scientists are able to define types of childhood cancers more precisely, Dr. Kolb said, “you get into increasingly smaller and smaller subsets of disease.”
“So if you want to run a clinical trial of a new therapy that may benefit those children, it could take decades to complete a trial if you only enroll children in the U.S.,” he added. “When we collaborate with our international partners, we can finish these trials much more quickly and get the therapies to children as soon as possible.”
In announcing the new directive, Dr. Bhattacharya cited recent Government Accountability Office reports that have been critical of funding given to international universities and laboratories, as well as businesses.
The issues highlighted by the G.A.O. reports “can lead to a breakdown in trust and potentially the security of the U.S. biomedical research enterprise,” Dr. Bhattacharya added.
N.I.H. spending on these international groups is difficult to track, one of the faults noted by the G.A.O. The journal Nature, which first reported the new policy, estimated the total at approximately $500 million a year.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has N.I.H. funding to study H.I.V. prevention and treatment in Kenya and South Africa, work that will be affected by the new policy.
Researchers like her must provide detailed information about international subawards when they apply for their grants, she said, including justifications for using a foreign entity and for each aspect of the budget.
International partners must now provide access to their lab notebooks, data and other documentation at least once a year, Dr. Gandhi noted. All of the expenditures are tracked on a system called the Foreign Award and Component Tracking System, or FACTS, she said.
“It’s very rigorous, as it should be when you’re using taxpayer dollars,” Dr. Gandhi said.
“Every year when you put in your progress report, you account for every penny that was spent at the foreign site — where it went, how much to lab tests, how much was paid investigators, every aspect.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how the new policy would be implemented. The N.I.H. did not respond to requests for additional information.
The N.I.H. will not retroactively halt foreign subawards already in place “at this time” and will continue to make awards directly to international groups, the agency’s statement said.
But the new policy will forbid new competing awards and noncompeting awards to be reissued if they propose subawards to foreign institutions.
“If a project is no longer viable without the foreign subawards, N.I.H. will work with the recipient to negotiate a bilateral termination of the project,” the statement said.
The new policy appeared to be somewhat less draconian than the summation put forth by Dr. Memoli in his internal email, which threatened immediate action to shut down or pause international sites.
“Subawards to foreign sites can’t continue,” he wrote. “This has been horribly mismanaged for years and it has been completely irresponsible. We must take immediate action. If a study has a foreign site we need to start closing it down or finding a different way to fund it that can be tracked properly.”
G.A.O. reports that had criticized various federal departments for lax reporting had called for improving oversight. But the office did not recommend terminating such funding altogether.
In 2023, a G.A.O. report reviewed $2 million in direct awards and subawards, most of it from the N.I.H., given to three Chinese research institutions, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, between 2014 and 2021.
The virology institute received subawards from the University of California, Irvine, and from the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance. The alliance’s work with Chinese scientists led former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to suspend its funding last year. The Trump administration recently changed the government portal for Covid information with a website suggesting that the new virus originated in a lab in Wuhan.
The G.A.O. report said that N.I.H. oversight didn’t always ensure that the foreign institutions complied with terms and conditions, including biosafety requirements.
One reason expenditures were hard to track was because of a federal government policy that required reporting subawards only of $30,000 or more, another G.A.O. report said.
That report examined some $48 million in N.I.H. and State Department funding that went to Chinese businesses and research institutions between 2017 and 2021, including one project to study diseases that are transmitted by insects, like malaria.
It found that “the full extent of these subawards is unknown,” and that data was incomplete and sometimes inaccurate, because so many expenditures were exempt from reporting.
Apoorva Mandavilli contributed reporting.
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Americans consume foods every day that are marketed as “healthy,” when they could be quietly destroying their health, one doctor warns.
Dr. Mark Hyman, physician and co-founder of Function Health in California, says that much of America’s daily diet is filled with unhealthy ingredients.
“The amount of refined starches and sugars that are everywhere is just staggering to me, given what we know about how harmful they are,” he shared in an interview with Fox News Digital. “I don’t think people really understand.”
Hyman, author of the new book “Food Fix Uncensored,” said he’s “astounded” by what people are eating, especially for breakfast.
“People just eat sugar for breakfast,” he said. “They have muffins, they have bagels, they have croissants, they have sugar-sweetened coffees and teas.”
Dr. Mark Hyman is the author of the new book “Food Fix Uncensored.” (Function Health; Little, Brown Spark)
In addition to the traditionally sweet options for breakfast, some cereal brands and breakfast staples have adopted new “protein-packed” menu items and products, following health trends that encourage eating more protein.
“Highly processed food is not food.”
“Now, we’re seeing this halo of protein in certain things,” Hyman said, mentioning that many protein smoothies are “full of sugar.”
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The doctor also noted that some popular cereals are now marketed as having protein in them. “My joke is, if it has a health claim on the label, it’s definitely bad for you,” he said.
Instead of starting the day with a “quick fix” or processed food, Hyman suggests choosing whole sources of protein and fat for breakfast, adding that “if there’s a little carbohydrate in there, it’s fine.”
More products marketed as “high protein” have cropped up on supermarket shelves. (iStock)
For his own breakfast, Hyman said he has a protein shake with whey protein, avocado and frozen berries. Eggs and avocados are also a great protein-and-fat combo option, he added.
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“It’s not that complicated — people need to just think about their breakfast not being dessert,” he said. “No wonder we’re in this cycle of obesity and diabetes. One in three teenage kids now has type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes. That’s just criminal.”
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Instead of counting calories and being in a caloric deficit as a way to lose weight and stay healthy, Hyman instead suggests focusing on how certain foods make you feel and how they impact your health.
“When you look at the way in which different types of calories affect your biology, you can just choose what you’re eating, and then you don’t have to worry about how much,” he told Fox News Digital.
In addition to the traditionally sweet options for breakfast, some cereal brands and breakfast staples have adopted new “protein-packed” menu items and products. (iStock)
“For example, if you eat a diet that doesn’t cause your insulin to spike — which is low in starch and sugar, higher in protein and fat — you won’t develop those swings in blood sugar, you won’t develop the spikes in insulin, you won’t deposit hungry fat … You will break that cycle.”
People are more likely to “self-regulate when they eat real food” instead of processed foods, which “bypasses the normal mechanisms of satiety, fullness and brain chemistry,” according to Hyman.
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“Ultraprocessed food and junk food or highly processed food is not food,” he said. “It doesn’t support the health and well-being of an organism. It doesn’t do that. It does the opposite.”
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Small fragments of plastic were found in the tumors of most prostate cancer patients, according to a new study from NYU Langone Health.
In past studies, microplastics have been found in almost every human organ and in bodily fluids, but their impact on human health still isn’t fully understood.
The researchers analyzed tissue samples from 10 patients with prostate cancer who underwent surgery to remove the entire organ.
Using visuals of both benign samples and tumor samples, as well as specialized equipment, the scientists identified plastic particles in 90% of the tumor samples and 70% of benign tissue samples, according to the study press release.
In past studies, microplastics were found in almost every single human organ along with bodily fluids, even the placenta. (iStock)
The cancerous tissue contained on average more than double the amount of plastic as healthy prostate tissue samples, the study found. This equates to about 40 micrograms of plastic per gram of tissue compared to 16 micrograms.
Researchers avoided contaminating the samples with other plastics by substituting standard tools with those made of aluminum, cotton and other non-plastic material, the release noted.
NIGHTLY BATHROOM HABIT WAS MISSED SIGN OF COMMON MEN’S CANCER: ‘I DIDN’T KNOW’
The scientists say this is the first direct evidence linking microplastics to prostate cancer.
“By uncovering yet another potential health concern posed by plastic, our findings highlight the need for stricter regulatory measures to limit the public’s exposure to these substances, which are everywhere in the environment,” said senior study author Vittorio Albergamo, assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in the release.
Using visuals of both benign samples and tumor samples, as well as specialized equipment, the scientists identified plastic particles in 90% of the tumor samples and 70% of benign tissue samples. (iStock)
The study findings were presented during the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in San Francisco on Feb. 26.
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“What is most striking is not that microplastics were detected, but that they were found embedded within tumor tissue itself,” Dr. David Sidransky, oncologist and medical advisor at SpotitEarly, a startup that offers an at-home breath-based test to detect early-stage cancer, told Fox News Digital.
“While complete avoidance is unrealistic, people can take practical steps to reduce exposure.”
“We already know microplastics are present in water, air, blood and even placental tissue. Their detection in prostate tumors suggests systemic distribution and long-term bioaccumulation,” added Maryland-based Sidransky, who was not involved in the study.
Study limitations
Albergamo cautioned that a larger sample is needed to confirm the findings. Additionally, Sidransky noted that the presence of microplastics alone does not prove they cause cancer.
“Tumors can act as ‘biologic sinks,’ meaning they may accumulate circulating particles simply because of altered vasculature and permeability,” he said.
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A key unanswered question, according to the doctor, is whether microplastics are biologically active in ways that “promote DNA damage, immune modulation or chronic inflammation within the prostate.”
About one in eight men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The most actionable step men can take is appropriate screening and early detection, according to doctors. (iStock)
For those concerned about microplastics, Sidransky offered some insights.
“I believe the appropriate response is curiosity, not panic, and a commitment to understand more,” he said.
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“While complete avoidance is unrealistic, people can take practical steps to reduce exposure, such as minimizing heating food in plastic containers, reducing bottled water consumption when possible, and favoring glass or stainless steel alternatives.”
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The most actionable step men can take, however, is getting appropriate screenings to help ensure early detection, according to the doctor. Screening discussions should be individualized based on age, family history and other risk factors.
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