Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: inushika Mohottige, MD, MPH, and her colleagues were surprised to receive a notice that their funding had been frozen for review just weeks after the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) awarded the team's 2025 funding.The team had been working on a study since June 2024, looking for potential environmental and structural factors, such as air pollution, water quality, healthy food access, and over-the-counter medications, that accelerate kidney diseases in a diverse population of US individuals with the apolipoprotein 1 (APOL1) genetic variant.The APOL1 genetic variant is more common among people of African ancestry but occurs across races and ethnicities."These are all factors that seem in accordance with the Make America Healthy Again initiatives," said Mohottige, who is an assistant professor at the Institute for Health Equity Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and a staff nephrologist at the James J. Peters Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx, but who spoke as a private individual and not on behalf of her institutions."We are focusing on curbing chronic disease, [we are] focusing on things in the environment that are making people more ill, and we are focusing on biological truths by identifying people who have genetic variants that put them, in many cases, at higher risk for accelerated kidney [diseases]."Ultimately, NIDDK terminated the grant in response to President Donald J. Trump's Executive Order, "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] Programs and Preferencing" (1).The grant termination is part of ongoing funding cancellations and layoffs that are reshaping the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and sending ripple effects through kidney disease research and care.President Trump's Executive Order, "Implementing the President's 'Department of Government Efficiency' Workforce Optimization Initiative," includes a "dramatic
Source: Kidney News
Author: Karen Blum
Language: English
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4410143267