Angelina Brown passed away one day while exercising. This is a horrifying experience that led her to a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. This is an irregular pounding condition in the upper heart chamber, the most common cardiac rhythmic abnormality in adults, affecting around 10 million Americans.
It can lead to blood clots, which increases the risk of stroke and heart failure. So, like many people with AFIB, as is commonly referred to, Brown was prescribed thin blood to reduce these risks. She didn’t like it.
“I get easily hurt. Even cutting myself, it took me a while for the bleeding to stop,” said Brown, 74, who lives about 80 miles outside Chicago. Even going to the dentist to clean her teeth was a challenge due to concerns about bleeding, she said.
Brown’s cardiologist Dr. Rod Pasman of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, suggested another option. Monitor AFIB using an Apple Watch with a modified algorithm and enroll in a new clinical trial that will only consume blood thinner when needed.
“Some patients are always in AFIB, while some patients are in AFIB once a year or once a few years. “I don’t think that makes sense.”
Brown will be the first patient to enroll in the exam. It is currently designed to sign over 1,700 people and run for another four years. If some people prove that AFIB can be personalised and managed, it could revolutionize the treatment of millions of Americans and reduce the use of costly blood thinners with unpleasant side effects. “This is huge,” Pasman said.
But he may not be able to get results.
The trial is funded by the US National Institutes of Health for $37 million, with the Northwest not receiving funding from the federal biomedical research institute since the end of March.
Northwestern had no official notice from the Trump administration, a university spokesman said, but White House officials told CNN in April that they had suspended $790 million in funding to the university as the government investigated allegations of discrimination.
A spokesman for the HHS told CNN that the Northwestern investigation was on anti-Semitism allegations, saying it released a May 13 news release that it released an unnamed “honorable Midwest University” investigation.
“Northwestern has no place for anti-Semitism,” a university spokesman responded, and the school took important steps to address anti-Semitism in the summer before the 2024-2025 academic year, and those actions made a difference.” Reports of anti-Semitism on campus “has been significantly reduced,” he said.
The administration has similarly suspended funding at universities such as Cornell, Columbia and Harvard, with a particularly public legal battle ongoing. Billions of dollars to Harvard have been halted from claims that the school tolerated anti-Semitism on campus.
Trump’s appointee, NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, said the agency was particularly sought to spare clinical trials from a fundraising moratorium at Harvard.
“We worked very hard to make sure we didn’t suspend grants to the medical center because of clinical trials,” Batacharya told Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat who represents Illinois, who represents Northwestern’s hometown, at this month’s budget hearing.
Durbin asked Bhatacharya to explain more than 1,300 NIH awards to the northwest that were frozen or fired, and a total of more than $81 million has been repaid since late March.
“I am very excited that these universities where these suspensions have occurred will reach the conditions and will move forward with the agenda you and I share,” Bhatacharya told Durbin.
However, the Northwest is not given the conditions to meet and all clinical trials are being affected because they are being conducted through universities, the spokesman said. The university’s ability to supplement the suspended NIH fund is expected to disappear by fall, several researchers told CNN.
HHS did not answer CNN’s questions about whether clinical trials in Northwestern were intended to halt while the investigation was underway.
“All research is at risk for the time being,” said Dr. Susan Kuagin, chairman of Northwestern School of Medicine. Among her biggest concerns is what will happen to patients in clinical trials. “If they stop, these exams will go away. They’ll end.”
Not only can patients stop receiving the type of treatment the trial provided, but it could also be possible to deny the study itself, even the information that the study itself has already been collected.
“They were pointless back then,” Quaggin said.
Beyond Passman’s AFIB study, trials on brain, colon, breast and pediatric cancer are at risk, a university spokesperson said. It includes multiple trials aimed at finding ways to prevent cancer.
Northwest Surgery Professor and Cancer Researcher Dr Sheema Khan, is trying to discover whether metformin, a drug that has been approved for decades for treating diabetes, can help prevent lung cancer.
Another trial will be testing a combination of vaccines to prevent cancer in people with Lynch syndrome. This is a genetic condition that leads to a very high risk of colorectal and other cancers, Khan said. The third uses the established drug tamoxifen to find individualized doses for women at high risk for breast cancer.
“The Northwestern Program includes 25 other agencies,” Kern said.
US Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said illness prevention is a key priority and is being dubbed “over-spiritualization” or as a key factor in his Make America Health, as a major report focused on child health released last month.
Khan asked how he gave up these goals with a halt on funding designed to reduce drug use or to prevent cancer.
Passman said he and his colleagues have “used all the possibilities” to maintain funds for his research. He also said it would be difficult to understand why the administration is suspending funding for medical research and clinical trials if its goal is to counter anti-Semitism.
“As a medical researcher, it’s difficult to understand why whether or not your undergraduate campus has addressed anti-Semitism can have an impact on the treatment or treatment of cancer, heart disease, and atrial fibrillation,” Pasman said. “For people who have dedicated their lives to helping people, it’s difficult to make that connection.”
Brown, the first patient at Passman’s trial, said she was able to keep her blood thinner since she had registered.
If the investigation ceased, “I would be disappointed,” she said.
She felt that it was particularly important for black people to participate in the history of medical experiments and abuse, as “historically, he would not take part in clinical trials.” Its history includes such a Tuskegee Un -Terarted Syphilis study, which ran from 1932 to 1972 and did not provide treatment for participants after it was available.
“I hope that NIH funds will be released,” Brown said. “And hopefully we can move forward with this research. I think that’s important because people may be in something that they have to be.”
