SF Chronicle: At UC Berkeley, Dem House members gather evidence to fight cuts to world-leading research

Written by Joe Garofoli

Days before they return to Washington to cast votes on the GOP-crafted budget, two California House members toured the Innovative Genomics Institute research lab at UC Berkeley Friday morning, in order to get a look at the real-life impacts of Republicans’ goal to whack $4 billion from the National Health Institute.

UC Berkeley receives $169 million in NIH funding.

Reps. Lateefah Simon, D-Oakland, and Ted Lieu, D-Los Angeles, met biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with her colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, for the co-development of CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing breakthrough. The technology enables scientists to rewrite DNA in any organism, which is leading to cures — or nearing cures for diseases ranging from sickle cell anemia to Parkinson’s disease to potentially 7,000 genetic diseases. They are also researching a type of drought-tolerant rice that could withstand rapidly changing climate conditions.

U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley blocked the proposed NIH cuts Friday until she can rule on an injunction, which would be a more permanent decision. Several organizations plus 22 states — including California — sued to block the cuts from taking effect, saying they would cause “irreparable harm.”

But the judicial hold can’t contain the chaos that the potential cut has wrought, said Gina Banks Daly, the director of federal relations at UC Berkeley.

“NIH funding at this moment, even with the temporary restraining order, is essentially frozen. So people are having to make admissions decisions, funding decisions, and we’re trying to act normally. But it’s hard to plan when you don’t know if the funding is going to come in or when it’s going to when that spigot is going to be turned on.”

A loss of funding would likely halt ongoing trials of therapies for people suffering from dementia and ALS, Berkeley scientists told the House members.

The private sector is abandoning the type of research being done at Berkeley because the return on investment for researching cures for rare diseases is low. That type of research is happening inside a glass-paneled building a short walk from the Campanile — but it takes time and money.

“It takes five years, maybe even 10 years, for us to make progress on this substantial challenge of sneaking these enzymes into cells,” said Ross Wilson, director of therapeutic delivery at the institute, said. “Industry, biotech, pharma, they don’t have the patience to invest five or 10 years in anything. They need a return on investment much more rapidly. NIH understands this. They know that academia and institutes like the IGI are the perfect place to do this sort of intersectional research that’s between academia and real-world impact.”

Petros Giannikopoulos, director of the IGI Clinical Laboratory and a professor of laboratory medicine at UCSF, said that without academic centers like Berkeley’s, “we can’t get this drug into the clinic.”

Lieu said the visit gave him some tools to articulate to Republicans that indiscriminately taking a hatchet to research funding is a mistake that not could not only affect people they know but also harm America’s standing in the world — a philosophy President Donald Trump describes as “America first.”

“To cut funding to cancer research and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and ALS is not only making America sicker, it is making us weaker in the sense that we’re no longer going to be the global leader in innovating medical research,” Lieu said.

Labs like this don’t just do cutting-edge research. They’re a training ground for top scientists who go into the pharmaceutical industry and academia.

“It’s really important to understand the impact of the delays and funding cuts, how that will impact the entire ecosystem. We train all the folks that go on to the biomedical industry as well,” Claire Clelland, a physician scientist at UCSF who sees patients with dementia and other diseases the lab is researching cures for.  

Federal cuts would also affect people like Brigette Manohar, a doctoral student at the lab from Trinidad and Tobago. Federal funds support her position and a $4,000 monthly stipend that doesn’t go far in a region where one-bedroom apartments rent for $2,300 a month.

If funding disappeared, that’s really my work, my future in the USA. So, yeah, I’m very anxious,” she said.

She is hoping to take the skills she’s learning here back to her home country.

“In Trinidad, we don’t have resources like this. So the reason I came to the IGI was because I want to see this happen in low-income countries such as my country. It’s really sad to see what these patients go through.”

Simon believes the UC Berkeley researchers make a bipartisan case for why NIH funding should be spared.

“University of California at Berkeley is a lifeline to potentially millions of families across the country that are touched by these rare diseases,” Simon said. Republicans should “know that staff will be cut, research will be halted. The impact will be on families, not just red families or blue families, but American families, and people all over the globe.”