Angelina Brown passed out while she was exercising one day, a scary experience that led her to a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. It’s a condition in which the heart’s upper chambers beat irregularly, and it’s the most common heart rhythm abnormality in adults, affecting about 10 million Americans.
Because it can lead to blood clots, it raises the risk of stroke and heart failure. So like many people with AFib, as it’s commonly called, Brown was prescribed a blood thinner to lower those risks. She didn’t like it.
“I would bruise easily, and if I even cut myself, it took a while for the bleeding to stop,” said Brown, 74, who lives about 80 miles outside Chicago. Even going to the dentist to have her teeth cleaned was a challenge because of the worries about bleeding, she said.
Brown’s cardiologist, Dr. Rod Passman at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, suggested another option: Enroll in his new clinical trial that would use an Apple Watch with a modified algorithm to monitor for Afib, and take blood thinners only when needed.
Brown become the first patient to enroll in the trial, which now has signed on more than 1,700 people and is designed to run for another four years. If it proves that some people can manage their AFib in an individualized way, it could revolutionize treatment for millions of Americans, reducing use of costly blood thinners that can come with unpleasant side effects. “This is huge,” Passman said.
But he may never get the results.
The trial is funded with $37 million from the US National Institutes of Health, and Northwestern hasn’t received any funding from the federal biomedical research agency since the end of March.
“There is no place for antisemitism at Northwestern,” a university spokesman said in response, noting that the school “took significant steps to address antisemitism in the summer before the 2024-2025 academic year, and those actions made a difference.” Reports of antisemitism on campus, he said, “were down significantly.”
Study results could be moot
The administration has similarly paused funding to universities including Cornell, Columbia and Harvard, where a particularly public legal battle has ensued. Billions of dollars in funding to Harvard was paused over claims that the school condoned antisemitism on campus, a move that threatens critical public health research, including one of the longest-running studies on nutrition and chronic disease.
NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Trump appointee, said the agency specifically sought to spare clinical trials from the funding pause at Harvard.
“I’ve worked very hard to make sure, for instance, at Harvard, we didn’t pause grants to the medical centers because there were clinical trials going on,” Bhattacharya told Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat representing Northwestern’s home state of Illinois, in a budget hearing this month.
Durbin had asked Bhattacharya to explain the more than 1,300 NIH awards to Northwestern that have been frozen or terminated, totaling more than $81 million in funding held back since late March.
“I’m very hopeful that these universities where these pauses have happened come to terms so that we can move forward with the agenda that you and I both share,” Bhattacharya told Durbin.
“All of the research is at immediate risk,” said Dr. Susan Quaggin, chair of Northwestern’s Department of Medicine. Among her biggest concerns is what happens to patients in clinical trials. “If they’re halted, these trials go away. They end.”
Not only do patients then potentially stop receiving the kind of treatment the trial provided, the research itself could be rendered moot – even the information already gathered.
“They’re meaningless then,” Quaggin said, “because you can’t stop a clinical trial mid-piece and then take it back up if and when the funds are unfrozen.”
Beyond Passman’s AFib study, trials on brain, colon, breast and childhood cancers are at risk, a university spokesperson said. That includes multiple trials aiming to find ways to prevent cancer.
One trial is seeking to discover whether the drug metformin, which has been approved for decades to treat diabetes, could help prevent lung cancer in people who are overweight and at high risk of the disease, said Dr. Seema Khan, a professor of surgery at Northwestern and a cancer researcher.
Another trial is testing a vaccine combination to prevent cancer in people with Lynch syndrome, an inherited condition that leads to a very high risk of colorectal and other cancers, Khan said. A third uses the established drug tamoxifen to find personalized doses for women at increased risk of breast cancer, something that hasn’t been done in cancer prevention, she said.
“The Northwestern program involves 25 other institutions,” Khan said, “so our ability to conduct our trials locally at our site, as well as at other sites – I mean, we are facing paralysis on that front.”
US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that prevention of disease is a key priority and named “overmedicalization,” or prescribing too many drugs, as a key factor in his Make America Healthy Again report focused on children’s health, released last month.
Asked how she squares those stated goals with the halting of funding designed to reduce medication use or prevent cancer, Khan replied, “I have great difficulty squaring it. There’s a big disconnect.”
Hope to move forward
Passman said he and colleagues are “exhausting all possibilities” to maintain funding for his study, which he’s worked on for almost 15 years. He too said it’s hard to understand why the administration is pausing funding for medical research and clinical trials if its goal is to counter antisemitism.
“As a medical researcher, it’s hard for me to understand why the way the undergraduate campus may or may not have dealt with antisemitism impacts the treatment or cures for cancer, heart disease, atrial fibrillation,” Passman said. “For someone who’s devoted their life to helping people, it is hard to make that connection.”
Brown, the first patient in Passman’s trial, said she’s been able to stay off her blood thinner since she enrolled.
If the research stopped, “I’d be disappointed,” she said.
She felt it was especially important for her to join because “Black people, on the whole, historically, do not participate in clinical trials” because of a history of mistreatment with medical experimentation. That history includes things like the Tuskegee Untreated Syphilis Study, which ran from 1932 to 1972 and didn’t offer participants treatment even after it was available.
“I hope that the NIH funding will be released,” Brown said. “And hopefully we’ll be able to move forward with this study. I think it’s important, because people could be on something that they don’t necessarily have to be on.”