Trump administration cutting $4 billion in medical research funding: How Bay Area could be impacted

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- The Trump administration has sent an earthquake through the medical research community. The National Institutes of Health is going to be cutting funding by $4 billion affecting local researchers who are working on everything from cancer to HIV.

"This is going to be a disaster," said Monica Gandhi M.D., Director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research on Friday. "We will not be able to function because we need the infrastructure and we need the staff."

The NIH is cutting what's called "indirect cost payments" down to 15%. The payments are made to universities in conjunction with the grants the NIH doles out for research. The money covers everything from administrative staff to facilities, such as labs . . . and top research universities can see rates well above 50%.

"To go down drastically to 15% was shocking today," said Dr. Gandhi. "We will go down to a rate that is so drastically cut that we won't be able to do a lot of our work."

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"We're very worried about the uncertainty of what's going to happen," said Pamela Munster M.D., professor of medicine at UCSF. Her cancer treatment research and clinical trials are often the last line of hope.

"My patients in clinical trials that are funded by the National Cancer Institute, are they going to continue? You can imagine I have patients who are quite anxious."

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Meanwhile, Dr. Gandhi says the impacts will be far-reaching. "Everyone who works at UCSF, which is of course, one of the biggest employers in the city of San Francisco," said Dr. Gandhi. "They are largely funded by the infrastructure support from the NIH indirect costs."

As of Friday night, the NIH funding cuts are set to go into effect Monday.