The proposal, led by Dr. Christopher Kemp of Fred Hutch and Dr. Venu Pillarisetty, a UW surgical oncologist, sought $833,000 a year for five years — $4.2 million total — to combine two innovative approaches to testing cancer treatments. Kemp’s lab tests cancer cells from tumors against 50 different drugs at six doses in tiny microplates, while Pillarisetty’s lab tests slices of whole tumors, including immune cells, to see how they respond to treatment.

“Best of both worlds,” Pillarisetty said of the collaboration.

The goal is to spare patients from undergoing toxic chemotherapy that may not work for them. “A blockbuster drug might work on 20, 25% of patients,” Pillarisetty said. “And that means the other 75% of people are getting the drug with all the toxicity, all the cost, all the time involved, without getting any of the benefit.”

The NIH rejected the grant without explanation, part of a broader shift in how the agency awards funding under the Trump administration. Political appointees have exerted extraordinary control over the grant-making process, according to reporting by The New York Times, seeking to eliminate spending seen as “woke” and to pressure elite universities. A list of 235 disfavored terms — including “changing climate,” “fossil fuel,” “diverse applicant,” “historically black,” “queer,” “vaccine acceptance” and “health equity” — now triggers reviews of grant applications, according to the journal Nature.

“Wow, cancer research, of all things. Come on,” said Kemp, 68, who has spent more than three decades at Fred Hutch. “If you put it to a referendum in the population, 90% would say, obviously, you have to fund cancer over a bazillion other things. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Since the rejection, Kemp and Pillarisetty have cobbled together $125,000 from the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network and $225,000 from the National Cancer Institute — about 8% of what they had proposed. To keep the work going, Kemp and his two staff members had their salaries cut in half, and one postdoctoral fellow was laid off.

“I’m not asking for tears. But we’re not elitists sitting in a golden cage, traveling to meetings, drinking fancy wines and taking these junkets,” Kemp said.

The cuts extend well beyond one lab. The UW is among the nation’s top five public universities receiving federal research dollars, with $1.14 billion in 2026. About 49% of that goes to UW Medicine, and between July 2025 and June 2026, it fell by 17%. Fred Hutch received $472 million in federal funding in 2025 and has seen less than a 2% decline heading into the 2026 fiscal year, a spokesperson said.

Ph.D. enrollment at UW Medicine has also suffered. For the second consecutive year, the school matriculated a third fewer students into its doctoral programs, down to about 108 in 2026, according to Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, executive vice dean for research and graduate education. The Association of American Universities warned in a July 2026 report that fewer Ph.D.s means “a thinner bench of innovators, fewer future scientific and medical breakthroughs, and a diminished capacity for the United States to compete against China and other nations.”

The damage is not limited to cancer research. Dr. Sebastian Tong, an assistant professor of family medicine at the UW and an addiction specialist who sees patients at Harborview Medical Center, was halfway through a four-year, $2.4 million project to help rural clinics treat methamphetamine and other substance use disorders when the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality terminated his grant in July 2026. The agency, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, said the continuation was not in the federal government’s best interest, citing shifting priorities.

Tong’s project had sent researchers to towns like Colville in Stevens County and to primary care practices in Virginia, Wyoming and Alaska. “They need training in providing addiction treatment. They need a peer network,” he said. “I’m pretty angry about it, yeah. There’s no reasoning as to why they’re doing it, other than they, I guess, don’t like science.”

At Fred Hutch, Angelica Andrade Latino, 27, a graduate student in molecular and cellular biology, saw her two-year NIH-funded grant as a research technician and student scholar cut after the first year. The $370,000 grant paid her $55,000 annual salary and covered benefits and indirect costs. She was able to stay on after her mentor, Dr. Sue Biggins, found money from another project with an unfilled position.

“Having that taken away was so disheartening,” Andrade Latino said. “You can’t help but think, ‘Why did they do this?’ I know that there are other people, with dreams, goals, plans that have been completely cut off.”

Jennifer Troyer, who worked at the NIH for 25 years before resigning on Dec. 31, 2025, said the agency’s mission has shifted “to cater to political expedience rather than scientific advancement.” She warned that even short funding gaps have cascading effects: a four-month pause can stretch to 18 months as staff are laid off, replacements are trained and data become invalid.

“With political people overseeing what’s funded, I think some of it is sheer incompetence,” Troyer said. “They don’t understand the science.”

For Kemp, the fight is personal. His mother died of colon cancer when he was 6, and his stepmother later died of kidney cancer. “That really got me mad,” he said. “I switched directions from trying to understand what causes cancer to how to kill cancer cells.”

Pillarisetty’s mother died of breast cancer a decade ago. As an oncologist, he said, “It’s forced me to face mortality in a way that most people don’t.”

Now, with the research stalled, Kemp grows emotional. “We’re about to get to the top of the mountain, but we just can’t get there,” he said. “We’ve covered great things.”

Nationally, grant terminations during 2025 initially halted funding for 383 clinical trials — about 1 in 30 such experiments — potentially affecting roughly 74,000 patients, according to a study in the American Medical Association’s peer-reviewed journal. The Brennan Center for Justice warns that “arbitrary funding cuts and assaults on agency independence have destabilized American scientific research, potentially setting technology, healthcare, and the economy back decades.”

Forty percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, according to the National Cancer Institute. For the researchers in Seattle, the stakes are measured in lives that might have been extended — and in the work that remains unfinished.