USAID funding cuts jeopardize breakthrough drugs and research

Just last month, researchers in South Africa were preparing to celebrate two major milestones in the fight against HIV: The rollout of a new injectable called lenacapavir, which had been shown to prevent sexual transmission of HIV with 100% efficacy, and the start of a Phase 1 clinical trial for an experimental vaccine against the virus.

However, the future of both programs has been thrown into jeopardy, after executive orders from the Trump administration to freeze foreign aid. Across the world, thousands of researchers targeting major global diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis have found themselves in a similar situation, as the withdrawal of funding from USAID has brought clinical trials and the rollout of groundbreaking new drugs to an abrupt halt.

The scale of the impact is hard to pinpoint, as online public records of projects receiving funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development have been erased. But experts such as Claudia Martínez, director of research at the Access to Medicine Foundation, fear a “ripple effect” when it comes to global health research that will be felt well beyond the current freeze on funding.