Dr. Jason Stubbs, a nephrologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center, is on the brink of the biggest breakthrough of his career.
Through studies on mice over the last decade, he has shown that damage to an important part of the kidney’s filtration system can be slowed when dietary phosphate is limited.
If he can make the same link in humans, he said, medicine could have an important new insight about how to help the 37 million Americans who are living with chronic kidney disease.
“One of the questions that we get asked all the time by patients is, ‘What can I do to help protect my kidneys?’” Stubbs said. “If you ask any nephrologist, the majority of them will not say you need to watch your dietary phosphate.”
But people are eating more dietary phosphate all the time. Food manufacturers add the mineral to snacks to boost protein and improve shelf life. And food packaging isn’t required to disclose how much is included.
That’s why Stubbs feels so much urgency to move forward with his research.
“If I can prove that dietary phosphate is driving kidney disease progression,” he said, “this should be something that we could potentially focus on as a way to … maybe lower the number of people who end up on dialysis.”
But, as with many scientists right now, Stubbs’ research is in limbo. He is waiting to hear if the National Institutes of Health will fund his latest grant application, which would allow his work to continue. Without that grant, he said, he doesn’t know how he would move forward.
“I’ve never been more excited about our research,” Stubbs said. “I can see where the mouse work can directly translate to improving human care. The downside is, I need the money to be able to support doing this.”
What is happening with research funding?
When the second Trump administration came into office a year ago, it abruptly canceled or froze thousands of federal grants. Research across the country was disrupted, including 383 ongoing clinical trials, which affected more than 74,000 patients.
According to Grant Witness, a scientist-run project tracking the fate of research grants, 5,484 NIH grants have been affected at some point. The same is true for 1,996 grants issued by the National Science Foundation.
Sometimes funding was delayed because language didn’t comply with political dictates and flagged words had to be scrubbed before funding was awarded. That happened to the KU Cancer Center.
In other cases, the topic of research was determined to be incongruous with the Trump administration’s priorities, so funding was canceled.
Meanwhile, major staffing reductions at the federal grant-making agencies have slowed the flow of money. The grant review process, a critical step required before new grants are funded, at times ground to a halt, while grants that had already been reviewed and rated languished.
That means that since the Trump administration returned to office, not only were existing grants canceled, new ones weren’t being funded. As a result, billions of dollars Congress had allocated for scientific research was going unspent.
By June, the Senate Appropriations Committee called on NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya to explain the situation. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle implored him to get back to funding medical research. They also said they would not support the administration’s budget proposal to cut NIH funding by nearly 40% going forward.
Those pleas may have worked. To date 61% of NIH grants that had been canceled or frozen earlier in the year were reinstated, according to Grant Witness. And about a third of the impacted NSF grants have been reinstated. And funding budgeted but not allocated went out the door.
Grants still in limbo
Still, scientists like Stubbs remain in limbo. And that is likely because of a policy change put in place under the Trump administration. While historically NIH funded most grants on a year-by-year basis, the agency’s new “forward funding” policy allocates multiple years of funding up front.
The result is fewer grants being awarded, leaving scientists facing much steeper competition for federal funding. Even seasoned scientists like Stubbs, who has had continuous NIH funding for years, are left waiting.
A recent analysis by The New York Times found that in 2025, NIH awarded 12,588 grants, compared with an average allocation in each of the previous nine years of 16,099.
Eleanor Dehoney, senior vice president of policy and advocacy with Research!America, said the change to forward funding could be fine, but it should have been made gradually. And it should have gone hand in hand with an increase in overall funding, she said. The abrupt change has effectively made it so research institutions across the country are competing for far fewer grants.
“The big, well-known universities that are good at doing grants — the ones that are on the coast, for example — get the big bucks,” Dehoney said. “And it leaves those who are up-and-comers behind.”
Bhattacharya visited KU Medical Center’s Kansas City campus on Nov. 21 at the invitation of U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas. Moran has been a staunch supporter of research at KU and its National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, and he has maintained his support for fully funding NIH.
In a written response to questions about his visit to Kansas City, Bhattacharya said ongoing research there “represents the extraordinary talent and dedication found in research communities across the country — not just on the coasts.”
Bhattacharya also met with medical and graduate students during the visit, his statement said, and he praised their “thoughtful questions about NIH funding and the future of biomedical research.”
Bhattacharya’s response did not include an answer to why the agency has changed the way it is funding grants.
The seed of breakthrough
Stubbs, who has had funding from the NIH for 15 years, doesn’t yet know whether his research will make the cut under the new NIH system. Recently, however, the agency finally called to request more information, which he hopes is a positive sign that his grant could be funded.
But he worries about how much the new scheme for awarding funds could limit future breakthroughs.
Government funding pays for basic research — figuring out how things work. The breakthrough he’s close to making, which could eventually lead to a new way for doctors to treat people with kidney disease, likely wouldn’t have happened without NIH funding.
In his case, more than 10 years ago he was involved in a study looking at a hormone that becomes elevated in people with kidney disease.
That hormone, which regulates phosphate and vitamin D, wasn’t affected when phosphate was restricted. But Stubbs noticed that the mice that had less phosphate sustained less kidney damage. His research since has been focused on figuring out why.
Finally, he’s getting close. He and a collaborator have been testing a therapy that seems to be successfully targeting phosphate in mice. But the current state of funding has meant he’s already had to pare back his lab to conserve resources. And that is slowing progress.
“I’ve worked on something for so long,” he said, “and I see a path where it could have a tremendous impact.”
As a doctor who sees patients every week, Stubbs understands the urgency. Kidney disease is difficult to treat, and it is devastating. Kidneys are central to filtering toxins out of the body and keeping all organ systems healthy. Someone whose kidneys aren’t functioning properly faces terrible outcomes.
But there aren’t many medicines doctors can prescribe that will slow down the disease’s progression.
Stubbs believes his research has real potential to help. But until his grant comes through, he won’t be able to push ahead and get back up to speed. And patients won’t benefit anytime soon from a potentially promising treatment.
That’s the real cost, Stubbs said.
“Coming to a roadblock where all of a sudden my funding is unclear,” he said. “It’s just difficult. … I feel like we could have had a lot of this done already.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
