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One of the country’s leading Alzheimer’s projects is in jeopardy

A pause to NIH funding has researchers scrambling for contingency plans at the University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. The center’s brain bank is preserving more than 4,000 brains for research.

By Evan Bush

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SEATTLE — Andrea Gilbert thought she knew what would happen to her brain.

The 79-year-old retired attorney, who has Alzheimer’s disease and receives care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, agreed to donate it for research in 2023. She hoped to help scientists unlock the keys to a disease that had left her writing notes to remind herself if she’d already brushed her teeth.

The fate of that program is now in limbo because the Trump administration has upended the system that funds biomedical research.

“It’s going to go one way or another. I’m not taking it with me,” Gilbert said from a hospital bed as she received an infusion of a drug designed to prevent the disease from worsening. “I hope it gets used well. But, you know, you can’t guarantee anything.”

Thousands of grants, including many at public universities and on topics as politically benign as Alzheimer’s, have been caught in what critics say is an unprecedented slowdown of the American research system that is threatening to upend universities and halt progress toward medical innovations, treatments and cures.

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The National Institutes of Health has been the primary funder of the University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) since 1985. The program supports a brain bank that accepts more than 200 donations yearly and is preserving more than 4,000 brains. The center’s grant funding, which is waiting for renewal, expires at the end of April. But grant decisions across the nation have slowed to a crawl, according to court filings.

The program has focused on unraveling the basic biology of the disease and factors that counter it. It discovered or helped identify three genes in which mutations cause Alzheimer’s.

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