How Chicago is Strategizing Around NIH Funding Cuts: Q&A with Michelle Hoffmann

Michelle Hoffmann, PhD
Executive director
Chicago Biomedical Consortium

Pharmaceutical Executive: How significant an impact have the cuts to federal healthcare research had?
Michelle Hoffmann: They’ve had a pretty significant impact. It's really the cuts to health and human services, which includes FDA and NIH, where we're seeing the impact. The Chicago Biomedical Consortium works across nine different research universities, and I can tell you that it has been very tense these last few months. I get my funding from Northwestern, and there are issues there with certain universities that have had NIH funding frozen.

We are a funding organization, and we get our funds mostly from philanthropy, but also from the NIH, so there's a little bit of uncertainty there. Where we sit, we play a vital role in that there are a lot of inventions that are possible from life sciences research across the nine universities in the Chicago area. However, there isn't a framework for turning those into early, commercializable products. What we do (and we do this specifically for biopharma) is work with an economic development mission in Illinois to see if we can find and fund the best research that has the potential to turn into biomedical applications across these nine universities. We use some of our own money to fund some of those experiments, but we also apply a rigorous venture-like lens on it (even though we don't have venture dollars). We're not a venture fund. We don't take equity. We're literally doing this as a public good for the state of Illinois. While we are funded mostly through philanthropy, our ability to turn things into biomedical applications is only as strong as the pipeline of basic research that feeds us.

It hasn't quite hit us yet because we already have things in the hopper. However, all the faculty that we work with are having issues.

Our goal is to get these inventions to IND and FDA. Because of the cuts, HHS is very slow these days. That is an issue in an area where time is money. That is how we are feeling this impact. I do want to say I believe that the federal government should be funding basic research. Absolutely, but we have known (even before this administration) that federal investment in real dollars has been shrinking.

Regarding the impact from the funding cuts, we see the wave coming.

PE: Will there be any significant, long-term impact?
Hoffmann: The issue with the foundational research that feeds biopharma applications is that it takes years to develop. Take immune-oncology drugs like a PD-1s. That has been a huge shift in how we treat cancer. The first one was approved in 2014. James Allison was down the hall from me in graduate school in 1997. Even then, he had this crazy idea that you can use your immune system, and specifically T cells, to combat tumors. It takes a long time.

Today’s funding cuts are happening while China is investing a ton into its biotech ecosystem. That is the other thing that is going to be felt. Without funding this type of research, we could see the US lose its primacy in biotech.

PE: What makes Chicago such a good area for an emerging biotech scene?
Hoffmann: Our mandate is Illinois and eventually the Midwest. The way that we think about it as Chicago is like a gateway to Midwestern IP. What makes Chicago ideal is that there are a ton of R1 research universities within the city, but also within a 200 mile radius. We have Purdue and Notre Dame, and further out there is Michigan and the University of Wisconsin. We have these great universities that generate a ton of IP within our catchment area, and Chicago has the lab infrastructure.

We have the certainly, the junior talent, and we're building the senior talent that knows how to take these things out of the university and de-risk it. And so, Chicago is a natural gateway.