The federal budget battle has come to San Francisco. The Trump administration has cut billions of dollars of funding to the National Institutes of Health. Critics have argued that the cuts risk not only derailing medical research that is underway but harming United States’ innovation in biomedicine for years to come as top researchers go elsewhere.
Those cuts are tied up in courts, but even without an immediate resolution, they have already had a negative impact on research and researchers. Dr. Deepak Srivastava, president and senior investigator at Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, has argued that the cuts are creating these negative impacts and risks right when medical science is making huge advances against some of the worst diseases.
Dr. Srivastava recently spoke to The Voice of San Francisco about the situation.
As you noted in your article, the final result of this slashing of NIH funding could take months as it works its way through the court. What specifically does that uncertainty mean for researchers and their research?
Deepak Srivastava: Because of the uncertainty around federal funding for biomedical research, the institutions in San Francisco have largely hit pause on investments in recruiting new talent, new clinical trials, even current clinical trials [face] uncertainty about whether they can continue or not, and certainly investment in anything new has been arrested. Even things that have begun have in many cases been paused.
European countries and probably other countries have been using this as an opportunity to try to poach researchers from the United States. Are you seeing evidence of that in San Francisco?
We are — both poaching, but also in some cases, people who had already made a commitment and planned to move to San Francisco from other countries, we’re beginning to see them say, “Maybe it’s not the right time to be coming to San Francisco or the United States for that matter.”
Part of the reason the United States has been the global leader in biomedical research and innovation has been because we have been a magnet for talent from all around the world to come here and for people to innovate and create new discoveries that lead to new companies, that lead to new therapies. That’s certainly at risk.
Artificial intelligence is part of the cutting-edge technology helping make dramatic health science advancements. AI and health science are two San Francisco strengths. But how does AI help health researchers — and please tell me it’s more than a scientist sitting at a computer saying, “Hey, ChatGPT, how do I cure cancer?”
[Laughs.] Our scientists here at the Gladstone Institutes are basically making the ChatGPT equivalent for biomedical science. You are absolutely right. San Francisco specifically is the epicenter for the world in AI technology. And because we are already sort of the hub of [the] biotechnology industry, and particularly at Mission Bay in San Francisco — Mission Bay is the home of one of the biggest health sciences hubs. Mission Bay is also the hub of a global AI effort. The two together in such close proximity puts us in a very unique situation of really bringing AI to health care in a way that no other place in the world could even come close to.
This is going to slow down the discoveries that could really revolutionize health care just at a moment where we should be accelerating.
Just at a time where we should be doubling down on the investment in how AI could impact our health, everybody has hit pause, and this is going to slow down the discoveries that could really revolutionize health care just at a moment where we should be accelerating. That’s the most tragic part of this situation. Every day that we slow down, there are more people who are going to die because of the advances that didn’t happen.
Can you talk more specifically about Gladstone and what specific threats is it facing?
The Gladstone Institutes . . . has a huge threat from these cuts. [From] the National Institutes of Health, the federal government, . . . typically we take about $20 million out of the $120 million budget from Gladstone. That’s $20 million we won’t have to invest in the next great breakthroughs. So it’s a pretty significant impact on us.
We’ve seen universities such as the Big 10 coalition banding together to fight against funding cuts coming from this administration. Is there anything similar taking place among scientific institutions?
Yes. The entire U.C. system as a common voice has banded together to pursue the legal angle to block some of the administration’s actions.
State Senator Scott Wiener has introduced SB 829 to create a California Institute for Scientific Research. What do you think of this effort?
I think it’s a fantastic idea for California to take matters into its own hands, given the abdication of the federal government, and really taking advantage of this opportunity to improve the health of America. There are many benefits for California taxpayers to take this initiative of saying that here in California, regardless of what the federal government does, we’re going to continue to invest in innovation and health care breakthroughs.
I think the reason for California taxpayers to consider doing this is really so that California continues to be at the forefront of innovation, because that is what then leads to economic benefit by California continuing to be the leader in the biotechnology part of the economy. I and many others believe that we’re living right now in the 21st century in what many of us call the Bio Century — where much as the semiconductor chip technology drove the 20th century economy, particularly here in Silicon Valley, in this century the technology that’s going to make the biggest impact will be in health care. Given the strengths we have here in San Francisco in life sciences and AI, there’s every opportunity for San Francisco and all of California to lead the biotech economy in the coming decades.
Are there alternatives to government funding?
Private philanthropy certainly is stepping up to fill some of the gap left by the federal government, but I don’t think that that by itself will be sufficient.
Are you optimistic about this fight?
I’m a terminal optimist, and while I know that in the short term we’re going to face some difficulties, I am optimistic about the impact we will have on curing some of these horrible diseases because at the end of the day, these things are just too important. . . .
There’s one aspect we didn’t talk about that doesn’t get talked about enough, and that relates to our budget deficit. If you look at our federal deficit, the biggest drivers that people don’t want to touch are Medicare and Medicaid; about 50 percent of all health care dollars are spent through the government right now. So it’s trillions of dollars; that’s been going up and up, and that’s a major driver of our budget deficits. You even hear right now in Congress just the idea of cutting people’s health care — it’s the third rail, it’s not palatable to people. So the only real way to address it is to innovate our way out of the problem by having to spend less because people don’t have these chronic deadly diseases. If you could address those at a lower cost, all of a sudden you bend the cost curve.
