OKLAHOMA CITY — A Trump administration freeze on grant approvals for potential lifesaving scientific research is causing uncertainty and confusion across Oklahoma City’s biotech industry.
After taking office on January 20th, incoming President Trump placed a freeze on reviews and approvals for scientific research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH,) the federal body that oversees more than $45 billion worth of research grant funding.
The freeze has sent waves of worry through Oklahoma City’s robust biotech industry and has cast a cloud of uncertainty over multiple potentially life-changing projects that had been waiting for NIH grant approvals to proceed with research.
News of the freeze was accompanied by a major reduction in already approved grant funding that is threatening hundreds of jobs in university labs across the state.
Even an ill-defined partial lifting of the NIH grant freeze Wednesday has only added to that confusion and uncertainty.
“The cost of doing research is just going to get worse and worse,” said Dr. Elaine Hamm, CEO of Ascend BioVentures, an OKC-based biotech accelerator for pharmaceutical projects. “There’s going to be a lot of jobs that are going to be lost.”
Waiting game
The NIH freeze came alongside a larger, across-the-board pause on all federal grant funding that caused widespread confusion and panic across the nation last month, including right here in the Oklahoma City government.
Though a judge and a quick reversal by the administration saw that pause lifted and rescinded, the freeze on NIH grant approval has been more complicated as it effectively prevents projects from being reviewed and approved for funding rather than just blocking the grant payments.
“Once you submit a grant proposal for NIH funding, you’re assigned to a group of reviewers and that group meets to review the proposals and to decide who gets funding and who doesn’t, and they meet on very specific dates,” Dr. Hamm explained to Free Press by phone this week.
Those group review meetings are called “study sections,” and the NIH freeze effectively halts study sections from meeting to review or consider any grant proposals at all by preventing them from posting the required meeting notices in the Federal Register.
“So after spending all of this time working on these grant proposals, even working on Christmas and on New Year’s Eve to turn them in, now we have no idea when these study sections will meet,” Hamm said. “They’ve been delayed indefinitely and we have no clear indication when – or even if – they’ll be rescheduled.”
Wednesday’s news of a “partial lifting” of the freeze appears to mean that some study sections will be allowed to meet, but there’s little explanation currently as to how many proposals will be considered or when others might become eligible for review, leaving researchers in limbo still.
Lifechanging developments
Of the thousands of research projects currently mired in uncertainty across the nation, the projects that Hamm has been working from OKC to fund and present are all potentially major life and health science projects that stand to benefit millions of people worldwide.
Working alongside small firms like Cadenza Bio and Otologic Pharmaceutics, as well as OKC labs like OMRF, Hamm has developed grant proposals for groundbreaking treatments targeting multiple sclerosis, infertility and endometriosis, and a long-in-development drug to reverse hearing loss.
Some of those projects were ready to move into clinical trials. All will be indefinitely interrupted until study sections resume normally or until non-grant funding can be secured.
Additionally, projects like the infertility program that Hamm has been overseeing are facing extra difficulties as reports have stated that administration officials are combing grant proposals for any flagged terms such as “trans” and “diversity,” but also simply “women.”
“When you’re working on women’s health, that’s a big problem,” Hamm said. “That could have a chilling effect on scientific research and funding.”
Funding and jobs elsewhere
If the NIH funding freeze stays in place long-term, researchers will likely be forced to turn to private funding sources, an avenue that could leave the industry out of Oklahoma.
“Not only do these issues jeopardize research that could save lives and improve patient care,” Hamm said in a follow-up email, “but they also risk forcing our company to seek venture capital funding exclusively and even consider relocating out of state for a more supportive investment climate in life science.”
If the largely grant-funded biotech industry of OKC begins to leave the city for the more viable and privately funded biotech hubs in places like Boston and San Francisco, the city could suffer a substantial hit to its workforce and economy.
According to the Greater OKC Chamber of Commerce, the biotech industry currently supports as many as 31,000 jobs in the city.
MAPS 4 even included nearly $77 million to develop the new Innovation District, a project aimed heavily at OKC’s biotech industry.
A long-term pause on NIH grants – coupled with the significant reduction in indirect funding grants – could result in a major blow to the residents of that new district, in particular Oklahoma State University, which currently maintains multiple sites in the area.
Ultimately, if the freeze on NIH grants holds – even with a partial lift in place – researchers might be forced to prioritize the most commercially viable projects and fully drop other potentially lifesaving projects.
“We might be forced to really focus on the things that we know have the biggest market,” Hamm said. “And that feels kind of gross, right?”
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
