Latest news with #ChanSchool
Boston Globe
20-06-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
Harvard has collected 3 million biological samples over decades. Now researchers may not have the money to preserve them.
The samples are kept at temperatures as low as minus-170 degrees Celsius (or minus-274 degrees Fahrenheit), in a network of liquid nitrogen freezers at the Chan School as well as at Brigham and Women's Hospital, according to 'If we really don't have any funding, we would lose the samples,' said Dr. Walter Willett, a Harvard professor and a principal investigator for the studies, in an interview. 'We're doing everything possible to not let that happen.' Advertisement The two programs affected are among the most comprehensive and long-running public health studies in the country. The Nurses' Health Study is A similar project, the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, tracks lifestyle and nutrition factors for men. Advertisement The two projects have yielded a number of landmark findings, including the link between alcohol consumption and breast cancer and the effects of trans fats on heart disease. The dataset generated from the massive project has informed countless additional studies by other researchers. Related : As part of the projects, researchers collected biological samples from roughly 350,000 individuals, monitoring various components, including nutrients, contaminants, and hormone levels. That research has been crucial to the growing understanding of factors that contribute to breast cancer, heart disease, and dementia, Willett said. 'Looking at what's going on inside the body a few decades before the disease occurs, that's what we can do [with the samples],' he said. 'That's really critical, because we know for many cancers, it's not what's in the blood or in the urine at the time of diagnosis, it's what was going on decades before that's probably most important. And we can go back to the samples and look at that today.' The collection of samples is among the most comprehensive in the world, Willett said. Its scientific potential — which will only increase as new research technologies are developed — is something that 'no amount of money can buy,' he added. Related : Both projects were funded in large part by two grants issued by the National Institute of Health's National Cancer Institute. Those grants were terminated on May 6, according to an affidavit filed by Willett June 2. Now, researchers are scrambling to keep the freezers running. Advertisement 'We have probably a couple of months worth of resources for paying our nitrogen bills,' Willett said. 'But the nitrogen company is very efficient in cutting off supply if we don't pay.' Though it's not clear exactly when the funding will run out, Willett said the research team may soon have to decide which samples are kept and which will be allowed to spoil. But because the sweeping nature of the study relies on having multiple samples from hundreds of thousands of people over a multi-year period, it's difficult to say which will be more useful for research purposes. 'We don't yet know who's going to get breast cancer,' Willett said. 'Which makes it impossible to predict exactly which samples will be the most valuable.' Nicole Romero examines samples on the campus of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on June 11, 2025. Kent Dayton/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Camilo Fonseca can be reached at
Boston Globe
16-06-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Harvard professor turns to private equity to counter Trump research cuts
Under the deal announced Monday, İş Private Equity, a Turkish firm, has committed $39 million to a laboratory run by Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, a professor of genetics and metabolism at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The firm, which is a branch of Turkey's İşbank Group, also plans to invest an undisclosed amount of money in any drug candidates that come out of Hotamışlıgil's laboratory and are moved into a new biotech called Enlila. It's a relatively modest deal, in the scope of investment banking. But the collaboration provides much-needed capital at a time when the model for funding scientific research has been thrown into chaos. Advertisement In the first six months of the Trump administration, government officials terminated at least Advertisement In all, Plans for the İş Private Equity collaboration pre-date the Trump administration's science grant retrenchment. Talks began last year, when Hotamışlıgil traveled to Turkey — where he was born and attended university — for a symposium celebrating İşbank Group's centennial. The event was filled with Nobel laureates, entrepreneurs, and others discussing the future of Turkey. Hotamışlıgil gave a presentation at the event detailing his experience as a scientist and his decades-long work exploring fatty acid binding proteins, or FABPs. This hormone is produced in fat cells and secreted into the blood, where it interacts with proteins to form a substance called fabkin. Elevated levels of fabkin are linked to obesity, The presentation caught the attention of İşbank's chief executive. Financing scientific research has always been a challenge, as Hotamışlıgil detailed to the İşbank Group event crowd. It's not easy to explore scientific unknowns while scrounging up grants and other capital. 'In the past, we were complaining about the principles of funding, which overwhelmingly tilted toward more conservative, more guaranteed outcomes… Then, suddenly, there was no funding,' Hotamışlıgil told STAT. Even now, Hotamışlıgil said he is shocked that a country like the U.S. would pull back its scientific financing so drastically, given how much success it's lent to large corporations and research institutions that elicit international envy. Advertisement The federal cuts have plunged many Chan School staff and faculty into cycles of grief and anger, said Amanda Spickard, the associate dean for research strategy and external affairs. They're now emerging from the daze to brainstorm new ways of replacing lost research dollars. In a letter sent out last week, the school's dean of faculty, Andrea Baccarelli, laid out an initial slate of strategies for replacing lost funding, including asking corporate partners to make $100,000 gifts to support Ph.D. students and post-doctorate fellows. The idea has been well-received by executives in need of highly trained employees, said Sarah Branstrator, managing director of academic strategy and research partnerships at the Chan School. School officials are also hopeful that the İşbank collaboration could be the first of multiple privately financed labs. There have been isolated examples in which investment firms have financed specific university centers or research projects, often for preferential access to any new scientific innovations that come out of the laboratories. Just across the Charles River from the Chan School, Harvard's Wyss Institute has spent the last five years working with an affiliate of the science-focused VC firm Northpond Ventures. Northpond initially committed $12 million to the alliance in 2020, and has made New York investment firm Deerfield Management has been much more aggressive in funding early-stage research. It has committed around $390 million to collaborations with Advertisement Hotamışlıgil's lab may be a unique case, as metabolism has become a hot area of drug development, thanks to the success of Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk's GLP-1 weight loss medications. Obesity-focused startups are still raking in Meanwhile, other areas of public health research, like infectious diseases and vaccines, are a 'It is probably too optimistic to say that government funding could completely be replaced. Government funding is really crucial to keep science as its engine. Having said that, for the school faculty, there are incredible opportunities, in my view,' Hotamışlıgil said. '[This] gives some hope that there's also some alternative ways that we can support science.'
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Federal Cuts Become ‘All Consuming' at Harvard's Public Health School
In a windowless conference room at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health last Thursday, Amanda Spickard, an associate dean, sat with half a dozen colleagues, improvising a plan for the havoc about to unfold. Within a few hours, more than 130 researchers at the graduate school would receive emails canceling the federal funding for their work. No other division of the university relies as heavily on government support, and Ms. Spickard's team was all too aware that the loss of tens of millions of dollars would end careers, halt progress toward medical breakthroughs and reshape the institution. As recently as a few weeks ago, everyone at the table had been consumed with other tasks in the Office of Research Strategy and Development, smoothing wrinkles with lab equipment or scientific journals for faculty members, who number nearly 200, and other researchers. Those concerns now seemed quaint and distant. 'Other work has ground to a halt, because this is all-consuming,' Ms. Spickard said. 'We're professional troubleshooters, but now for 190 people at the same time, all facing an existential crisis.' Since April 14, when Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands from the Trump administration, the Chan School had braced for a crackdown. The administration promised to freeze more than $2 billion in grants and contracts to the entire university; the public health school had been slated to receive more than $200 million in federal grants and contracts in the current fiscal year. The administration has argued that wealthy universities like Harvard, which has a $53 billion endowment, should be able to fund their work without the help of the federal government. In a recent letter to Harvard, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, wrote that the university 'should have no problem using its overflowing endowment to fund its bloated bureaucracy.' The faculty at the Chan School had watched with growing trepidation as early 'stop work' orders trickled in from the government and the school began to scale back spending. Among other things, it ended leases on off-campus buildings, cut summer programs for high school students and replaced an end-of-year reception with a 'spring stroll' in a public garden. Then last week, the trickle became a flood, swamping a school where 59 percent of operating revenue comes from the federal government and other outside sponsors. By comparison, Harvard Medical School receives 35 percent of its revenue from such sponsors, the Graduate School of Education 22 percent, the Kennedy School of Government 16 percent, and Harvard Law School 3 percent. 'It's one thing to suspect it, and another thing to go through it,' said Marc Weisskopf, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Chan School, who was off campus at a symposium on aging when the email canceling his funding appeared in his inbox. 'It feels like a gut punch.' Painful as it was for him to contemplate the end of his 20-year quest to understand why military veterans are more likely to be diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, Dr. Weisskopf said his first thought was his staff, 10 to 15 researchers whose jobs and futures were now at serious risk. Originally established in 1913 as the Harvard-M.I.T. School of Health Officers, the first professional training program in the country for public health leaders, the school became its own degree-granting branch of Harvard in 1946. It was renamed in 2014 after a record-breaking $350 million gift led by Gerald Chan, an alumnus who intended it to be 'a tool for stimulating the spirit of service.' A key element of its mission has been to improve the health of underserved groups, including women, children, people of color and L.G.B.T.Q. people. That focus on 'health equity' has made the school a target of the Trump administration, which initially told some Chan researchers that their funding had been stopped because of 'amorphous equity objectives' that were 'antithetical to scientific inquiry.' Such goals, federal health officials wrote to at least one student researcher, 'do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life or reduce illness.' As Harvard hardened its position, the funding freeze expanded to every corner of Chan's portfolio. The administration's explanations grew less nuanced, and became more broadly focused on Harvard's 'troubling entitlement mind-set,' and allegations that the university had allowed antisemitism to fester unchecked. Other top-tier schools of public health have also taken hits, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. But no other place has seen its federal support so fully withdrawn as the Chan School. 'This is ground zero,' said Walter Willett, a Chan epidemiologist who has spent 40 years studying the effects of diet and other lifestyle factors on heart disease and cancer. As technology rapidly advances, he said, the potential of biomedical research is fast expanding, as is the value of the repositories that the school has built over decades. In one storage facility on campus, three million blood and urine samples, collected from 100,000 nurses over more than 40 years, are kept in freezers filled with liquid nitrogen, available for use by scientists around the country. The United States is now at risk of falling behind, just as it was poised for acceleration, Dr. Willett said: 'We're giving away one of the few areas, biomedical science, where we have had global leadership.' The research at the Chan School is dizzying in its diversity. Among hundreds of other subjects, faculty members study aging and life spans; the connection between Medicare coverage and mortality; the cancer risk of eating red meat; links between environmental exposures and dementia; the parasites that cause malaria; children's mental health in migrant detention centers; and the relationship between coffee consumption, gut health and colon cancer. Among those who have been ordered to end their funded research is Sarah Fortune, a tuberculosis expert seeking better prevention and treatment for the disease, and Alberto Ascherio, an epidemiologist whose work probing causes of multiple sclerosis, by tracking the health of 10 million soldiers, won a prestigious Breakthrough Prize last month after he found that people infected with the Epstein-Barr virus were at increased risk of developing M.S. In retrospect, some of the school's scientists said, it would have been wise to diversify their funding sources. But because the federal grant review process is known for its competitive rigor, the school had seen its robust federal support as evidence of strength, not weakness or dependency, administrators and researchers said. Defenders of the school say that the Trump administration's narrative has twisted the long history of fruitful collaboration between the government and universities, depicting scientists as freeloaders without acknowledging the lasting public benefit of deep research investments. 'It came out of the government saying, back to World War II, 'We want to lead the world in science and technology,'' said Ms. Spickard, the associate dean. 'They were commissioning us to do this work.' Kenneth L. Marcus, who served as head of civil rights in the Education Department during the first Trump administration, said that did not free Harvard from responsibility for its campus climate. 'As government officials, we often have an agonizing choice between cutting beneficial programs and permitting continued civil rights violations,' said Mr. Marcus, the chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. The Chan School's compact campus — wedged among highly rated hospitals such as Brigham and Women's and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the Longwood neighborhood of Boston — sits across a courtyard from the towering marble columns of Harvard Medical School. About 40 percent of Chan students are international, and conversations in English, Spanish and Japanese could be heard in its halls one recent afternoon. The tables in the cafeteria were covered with white paper last week, so students stressed by finals could take a coloring break. In the busy atrium at the school's main entrance, a staff videographer recruited students and scientists passing by to describe their research in just seven words, part of a crisis-driven push to clearly communicate the school's contributions. That skill will be critical as Chan tries to pivot to new funding sources, said administrators, who are rapidly planning workshops where faculty members can hone their elevator pitches and learn strategies for networking with potential industry and foundation donors. First, though, researchers will have to master other new skills, like how to lay off staff members and notify thousands of longtime study participants that their help may no longer be needed. At their planning meeting last week, research staff members devised a 'bad news care package' to be emailed to lead researchers, with links to policies and contacts that they would need as they winnowed their teams and wound down their studies. 'We're asking faculty, in a very taxing, chaotic time, to also be entrepreneurial,' Ms. Spickard said, 'and that's a tall order for people whose life work is being undone in real time.' Some of the school's researchers are already being recruited by universities in Europe and China who see a sudden opportunity, said Karen Emmons, a professor of social and behavioral sciences. Others may find their prospects, and enthusiasm, dimmed as a result of what is happening. 'Feeling like a pariah is hard for younger people,' she said. 'It's a very different way of being.' Disha Ganjegunte, who is graduating next week with a master's degree in global health, and is the president of the Chan School's student government, said the pressure on the school had only deepened her commitment to her work in human rights and conflict resolution. 'Opposition doesn't make these issues any less real,' she said. 'Public health as a field is very resilient, and it's overcome a lot, from climate change to human rights being questioned. I think what's happening is a wake-up call, and it only makes me more stubborn.'
