Students study for final exams in the UBC Life Building of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, B.C. on April 14.Chris Helgren/Reuters
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has pulled funding from a University of British Columbia research project on women and HIV care, with the government agency blaming the project’s “amorphous equity objectives” and commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion.
The termination of funding is part of a broader overhauling of the NIH and other U.S. government agencies under the Trump administration that has alarmed the scientific community. Last Monday, the NIH updated its grants policy statement to state that recipients cannot have diversity, equity and inclusion programs or engage in “discriminatory boycotts” of Israeli companies.
The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, with most of its nearly US$48-billion annual budget going toward research grants. The changes at the U.S. government agency have prompted Canadian research granting agencies to examine what the impact will be on research here.
A March 20 letter sent to UBC research manager Phoebe Lu, obtained by The Globe and Mail, said the premise of the project is now incompatible with agency priorities and that funding would end.
“Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness,” wrote Michelle Bulls on behalf of Theresa Jarosik, chief grants management officer at the National Institute of Mental Health.
“Worse, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”
The UBC project explores how gender-based violence affects HIV care for women. It considers factors including sexual orientation, gender identity and race, while making recommendations for the development of interventions that take trauma and violence into account.
The project follows nearly 400 women accessing HIV care in Metro Vancouver – roughly 90 per cent who identified as cisgender and 10 per cent transgender, nonbinary, two-spirit or gender-diverse.
The longitudinal study was in its final year of a five-year grant. The NIH had awarded the project approximately US$470,000 each year since 2021 and in December had approved about US$400,000 for this year.
It’s unclear what the full impact will be on the project, including whether it will be able to secure funding from other sources.
Canada has three federal funding agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). However, Canada lags behind many other developed countries in research funding, and approval rates for grants are low.
CIHR, the core funder of biomedical research in Canada, invested about $1.3-billion in grants and awards in 2024-25. This included $411-million for 453 grants in its fall 2024 competition, amounting to a national success rate of 17.2 per cent.
David Wolkowski, strategic communications lead at CIHR, said the agency is working to understand the impact of changes in the U.S. on Canadian health researchers. The agency has asked Universities Canada, an association that represents the country’s universities; U15, which represents Canada’s 15 leading research universities; and Research Canada, a national alliance dedicated to health research and innovation; to gather information on funding changes as they relate to Canadian research.
The Canada Research Coordinating Committee, which consists of Canada’s three funding agencies and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, has also created a working group to examine the situation, he said.
“Given that many factors are currently in flux in the U.S., the extent of the impact on Canada remains unknown at this time,” Mr. Wolkowski said.
Within a day of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders stating that diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs are illegal and discriminatory, and that there are only two sexes, doing away with “the concept of ‘gender identity.’”
The Globe and Mail reported on April 7 that the Canadian Cancer Trials Group (CCTG) was directed to remove gender-inclusive language from its U.S.-funded trials to comply with that second executive order.
In Canada, CIHR has underscored the difference between sex and gender and explicitly advises research applicants to integrate both into research design and practice where appropriate.
Karen Wallace, executive director of the Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research, said that respect for human dignity is expressed through three core principles in a joint policy followed by Canada’s three research funding agencies: respect for persons, concern for welfare, and justice. It also recognizes a distinction between sex and gender.
However, it also recognizes that researchers must consider other rules and regulations, within and outside of Canada, depending on where the research is being conducted and who is funding or conducting it, she said.
The policy notes that researchers may experience tension between those rules and the ethical guidelines in the policy, Ms. Wallace wrote in an e-mail.
“In such situations, researchers should strive to comply with the law in the application of ethical principles.”
Jennifer Bell, a senior bioethicist, director of bioethics research and assistant professor at the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics, said the fact that these research groups had to secure funding from the U.S. signals a lost opportunity for the Canadian government to support Canadian research infrastructure, science and the economy.
“The Canadian government should step up and fund the trials that are affected by the U.S. executive order and help secure a financial pathway so that the CCTG and other researchers can be made independent from the U.S. and its current harmful political ideology,” she said.