Trump admin axed 383 active clinical trials, dumping over 74K participants

Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width Standard Wide Links Standard Orange Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav When the Trump administration brutally cut federal funding for biomedical research earlier this year, at least 383 clinical trials that were already in progress were abruptly cancelled, cutting off over 74,000 trial participants from their experimental treatments, monitoring, or follow-ups, according to a study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study, led by researchers at Harvard, fills a knowledge gap of how the Trump administrations research funding cuts affected clinical trials specifically. It makes clear not just the wastefulness and inefficiency of the cuts but also the deep ethical violations, JAMA Internal Medicine editors wrote in an accompanying editors note. In March, the National Institutes of Health, under the control of the Trump administration, announced that it would cancel 1.8 billion in grant funding that wasnt aligned with the administrations priorities. The Harvard researchers, led by health care policy expert Anupam Jena, used an NIH database and a federal accountability tracking tool to find grants supporting clinical trials that were active as of February 28 but had been terminated by August 15. During that time, there were 11,008 trials funded and in various stages. Of those, 383 were terminated. Some cancelled trials were still in early phases before recruiting participants (14 percent), some were in the process of recruiting participants and hadnt yet fully begun (34.5 percent), a sliver were enrolling participants by invitation (3.4 percent), and some were completed (36 percent).