The U.S. has been a global leader in research and innovation for decades. But recently, the federal government has directed agencies like the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, to cut funding. It also prohibited U.S. institutions from directing new or renewed grants to international partners like Canada. Scientific progress doesn’t see borders. It takes bright minds from all around the world to share knowledge and accelerate solutions to problems. That’s why these cuts will affect researchers worldwide. In Canada, the destructive effects are already reverberating through our research labs and medical institutions.
Related: The U.S. has been a global leader in research and innovation for decades. But recently, the federal government has directed agencies like the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, to cut funding. It also prohibited U.S. institutions from directing new or renewed grants to international partners like Canada. Scientific progress doesn’t see borders. It takes bright minds from all around the world to share knowledge and accelerate solutions to problems. That’s why these cuts will affect researchers worldwide. In Canada, the destructive effects are already reverberating through our research labs and medical institutions.
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Grants from the U.S. normally range from about $100,000 to several million dollars annually, which pays for highly skilled lab trainees and staff and the specialized equipment, chemicals and supplies needed for their experiments. They lead to breakthroughs for things like high-fatality cancers, developing new systems to test human disease and synthesizing more effective drugs.
At the University of Toronto, where I’m vice-president of research and innovation and strategic initiatives, researchers receive approximately $20 million each year from U.S. granting bodies (roughly 75 per cent comes from the NIH). It might seem like a small number compared to the university’s total research budget, but in practice it can make or break projects tied to U.S. partners.
I’ve directly benefited from NIH funding myself. As a professor in the faculty of medicine, I spend a lot of time researching the deadly fungi that wreak havoc in hospitals and are now considered an urgent public threat by the World Health Organization; every year, 2.5 million people die from fungal infections. My international research team, supported in part by NIH funding, set out to change that. Our work targeting anti-fungal resistance led to the creation of a biotech company called Bright Angel Therapeutics, which is accelerating the discovery and development of much-needed new classes of anti-fungal drugs.
Those future medications could extend many lives and improve many more. I’m lucky that my funding from the NIH has continued, but the future of many other brilliant researchers and projects across Canada remains uncertain. That’s why so many of us were watching U.S. policy shifts so closely earlier this year.
Once it was clear that our work would be impacted by funding cuts, U of T President Melanie Woodin, in consultation with myself and other university leaders, created an emergency research fund. It’s a one-year lifeline that keeps graduate students and postdoctoral researchers afloat, so their work keeps moving while research teams look for external financial support.
No one institution could fully replace all the money that was rescinded, but our fund has managed to prevent some devastating interruptions. For example, molecular geneticist Artem Babaian runs a lab developing new tools to scan genetic databases for elusive RNA viruses, which may help create treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s and cancer. He’d been working with a collaborator in New York, but when the U.S. implemented a policy change that cut off cross-border support, his young lab risked collapsing overnight. He was able to access the emergency research fund and keep doing his work.
Medical biophysicist Paul Fraser also avoided a heavy blow with the creation of the emergency fund. He was working with colleagues at Columbia University and another team of collaborators in Italy on a promising therapy for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disorders. The cuts left him worried not only about stalling research, but also about losing a team that had already gained expertise. In biomedical science, losing graduate and post-doctoral students means losing innovation and fresh perspectives that keep pushing discovery forward.
The emergency research fund is just one way to make up the difference. Our research community can also consider diversifying our partners beyond the United States—such as Horizon Europe, the European Union’s $140-billion, seven-year research initiative. Through this program, Canadian researchers collaborate with industry, not-for-profits and academics to solve major societal challenges in areas like health, climate, food and agriculture, AI and manufacturing. Canadian researchers are already joining these collaborations and securing funding for critical projects, including U of T researchers who are combating drug-resistant tuberculosis.
There is also more we can do at home to avoid reliance on foreign funding and to cultivate our own ecosystem. The federal government’s 2025 budget commitments to research and innovation funding is a great start: it promises more than $1.7 billion for talent, which includes Ph.D. and post-doctoral students, early-career researchers and senior faculty. The inauguration of the Bureau of Research, Engineering and Advanced Leadership in Innovation and Science, or BOREALIS, also brings significant investment to modernize Canadian defence and national security.
Now is the time to bring home talented Canadians, and to recruit the next generation of nation builders who will build collaborations both at home and globally. The task is huge, but so is the opportunity.
Leah Cowen is vice-president, research and innovation and strategic initiatives at the University of Toronto.
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Canada’s University Admissions Process Is Burning Students Out
I’m a third-year student in a highly competitive program. Here’s what I think needs to change about university admissions in Canada.
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A group of University of British Columbia professors say their administration is taking too many political stances and should commit to institutional neutrality. They’re going to court to prove it.
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Under Donald Trump, the United States is sabotaging its reputation as a beacon for researchers, scientists and academics. Canada should seize the moment.
I Let an AI Avatar Teach My University Course
She looked and sounded exactly like me—and left us all with more questions than answers