Martha Bebinger, WBUR
Inside a most cancers analysis laboratory on the campus of Harvard Medical School, two dozen small jars with pink plastic lids sat on a steel counter. Inside these humble-looking jars is the core of Joan Brugge’s present multiyear analysis undertaking.
Brugge lifted up one of many jars and gazed at it with reverence. Each jar holds samples of breast tissue donated by sufferers after they underwent a tissue biopsy or breast surgical procedure — samples that will reveal a brand new strategy to stop breast most cancers.
Brugge and her analysis group have analyzed the cell construction of greater than 100 samples.
Using high-powered microscopes and complicated pc algorithms, they diagram every stage within the growth of breast most cancers: from the primary signal of cell mutation to the formation of tiny clusters, properly earlier than they’re giant sufficient to be thought-about tumors.
Their quest is to forestall breast most cancers, a illness that afflicts roughly 1 in 8 U.S. ladies over their lifetimes, in addition to some males. Their final aim is to alleviate the ache, struggling, and threat of loss of life that accompany this illness. And their painstaking work, unspooling throughout six years of a seven-year, $7 million federal grant, has yielded outcomes.
In late 2024, Brugge and her colleagues identified specific cells in breast tissue that comprise the genetic seeds of breast tumors.
And they found that these “seed cells” are surprisingly widespread. In reality, they’re current within the regular, wholesome tissue of each breast pattern her lab has examined, Brugge mentioned, together with samples from sufferers who haven’t had breast most cancers however have had surgical procedure for different causes, resembling breast discount or a biopsy that proved benign.
The subsequent analysis problem for Brugge’s lab is obvious: Find methods to detect, isolate, and terminate the mutant cells earlier than they will unfold and type tumors.
“I’m excited about what we’re doing right now,” Brugge mentioned. “I think we could make a difference, so I don’t want to stop.”
Work in Brugge’s lab slowed considerably final 12 months. In April, her $7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute on the National Institutes of Health was frozen, together with just about all different federal cash awarded to Harvard researchers.
The Trump administration mentioned it was withholding the funds over the university’s handling of antisemitism on campus.
Some of Brugge’s lab workers misplaced federal fellowships that funded their work. Brugge informed others funded by way of the NIH grant that she couldn’t assure their salaries. In all, Brugge misplaced seven of her 18 lab workers.
In September, the funding for the NIH grant was restored. But within the intervening months, the Trump administration mentioned Brugge and different Harvard researchers needn’t bother applying for the following spherical of multiyear grants.
A federal decide lifted that ban, however Brugge had missed the deadline to use for renewal. So her present funding will finish in August.
Brugge scrambled to safe personal funding from foundations and philanthropists. She was then in a position to reinstate two positions for at the least a 12 months — however job candidates are cautious.
Across the United States, the way forward for federal funding for most cancers analysis is unsure.
President Donald Trump has proposed cutting the NIH budget by almost 40% within the 2026 fiscal 12 months.
In a budget message, the White House mentioned the “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”
But Congress has different plans: The Senate and House Appropriations Committees launched a compromise bill on Jan. 20 that will set the NIH’s price range at $48.7 billion, $415 million greater than within the 2025 fiscal 12 months.
In the meantime, advocates resembling Mark Fleury with the American Cancer Society are reminding lawmakers that the most cancers loss of life fee has declined — by 34% since the early 1990s — due partially to federally funded analysis advances.
“But we still have an incredible ways to go before we can say that we’ve changed the trajectory of cancer,” Fleury mentioned. “There are still cancer types that are fairly lethal, and there are still populations of people for whom their experience of cancer is vastly different from other groups.”
Reductions in analysis funding could have a direct impression on therapy choices for sufferers, Fleury mentioned. For instance, a ten% lower to the NIH price range would finally lead to two fewer new medicine or remedies per 12 months, in accordance with a projection from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
A current research checked out medicine that have been developed by way of NIH-funded analysis and accredited by the Food and Drug Administration since 2000. More than half these medicine would in all probability not have been developed if the NIH had been working with a 40% smaller price range.
“We can’t say, ‘But for that grant, that [specific] drug would not have come into existence,’” mentioned Pierre Azoulay, a co-author of the research and a professor on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But fewer medicine would have made it to market, he mentioned. “It makes us at least want to pause and say, ‘What are we doing here? Are we shooting ourselves in the foot?’”
Amid all of the uncertainty, Brugge has bother specializing in her aim of discovering new methods to forestall breast most cancers.
Nowadays, she spends about half her time looking for new sources of funding, managing her remaining workers’ anxieties, and monitoring the latest information about Harvard, the Trump administration, and the NIH and different federal businesses which have skilled grant freezes, workers layoffs, and different disruptions.
She’d relatively return her consideration to her ongoing investigations, which she’s assured may finally save lives.
The breakdown of Brugge’s lab highlights one other drawback: The U.S. is kneecapping the following technology of most cancers researchers. Her workers included staff scientists, postdocs, and graduate college students. Of the seven who left the lab in 2025, one left the U.S., one took a job at a well being care administration firm, 4 went again to high school, and one continues to be in search of work.
One of Brugge’s former staffers, Y., is a computational biologist. She helped design and run a instrument that analyzes thousands and thousands of breast tissue cells from the samples within the pink-lidded jars.
Y. moved to Switzerland in October to start a PhD program. KFF Health News and NPR are figuring out her by her center preliminary as a result of she plans to return to the U.S. for scientific conferences and worries that talking publicly about her expertise may threat future visa approvals.
“I thought the U.S. would be a safe place for scientists to learn and grow,” mentioned Y., who moved to Boston from overseas for Harvard’s grasp’s diploma program in bioinformatics. “I really hope that those who have the opportunities to study this further can fill in those missing pieces in cancer research.”
Brugge is not accepting job candidates from outdoors the U.S., even when they’re prime candidates, as a result of she will be able to’t afford to pay the Trump administration’s new $100,000 fee on visas for some overseas researchers.
The Association of American Universities and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have filed a legal challenge, claiming the price is misguided and unlawful. The Trump administration mentioned the price would discourage reliance on foreign workers and enhance alternatives for Americans.
Brugge doubts work in her lab will ever return to regular.
“There’ll always be, now, this existential threat to the research,” Brugge mentioned. “I will definitely be concerned because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future that might trigger a similar kind of action.”
Brugge has thought of shutting down her lab. But she nonetheless employs workers members whose future scientific careers are tied to ending among the analysis. And when she appears at these pink-lidded jars, she nonetheless sees a lot promise.
This article is from a partnership that features WBUR, NPR, and KFF Health News.