Harvard Turns to the Private Sector To Finance Research After Losing Federal Funding
This pivot to privately funded research could reduce the burden on taxpayers and lead to more scientific breakthroughs.
Despite being a private institution with a $53.2 billion endowment, Harvard University is a large beneficiary of federal funding, receiving $686 million in federal dollars in FY 2024. Recently, the university has come under fire from the Trump administration, which has cut away billions of dollars of Harvard's research grants. This action has especially impacted the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, home to a large contingent of Harvard's medical research labs, which relies on government funds for nearly half of its annual budget. In response, the school has turned to the private sector for assistance.
In June, İş Private Equity, a Turkish-owned private equity firm and subsidiary of Türkiye İşbank Group, said that it would commit nearly $39 million over 10 years to support Gökhan Hotamışlıgil's "research on new antibodies for obesity and other metabolic diseases," according to Fierce Biotech.
Hotamışlıgil, a professor of genetics and metabolism, has spent over 20 years studying FABP4, a fatty-acid–binding protein. When secreted into the bloodstream, FABP4 forms "a hormone complex called fabkin," which causes adverse health effects like inflammation and obesity, explained the Chan School. Hotamışlıgil and his team have been working on ways to reduce fabkin levels and have developed a lab-engineered antibody that they think could "prevent or treat various metabolic diseases and diseases of aging."
After the antibodies are ready for human testing (they've only been tested on lab mice), Enlila, a biotech startup launched by İş Private Equity, intends to sell the antibodies in the American market. The company plans to license the antibodies from Hotamışlıgil for use in clinical therapy.
This announcement might provide a blueprint for funding research on college campuses. Andrea Baccarelli, dean of the Chan School, said that amid budget-cutting concerns, the school's Office of Research Strategy and Development has formed a faculty advisory group with the intent of "reaching out to alumni in the private sector to help forge new connections," reports Fierce Biotech.
This pivot to privately funded research would not only reduce the burden on taxpayers, but it could lead to more scientific breakthroughs. The federal government is the largest financier of research in the U.S., which has crowded out private sector investment and raised concerns about scientific integrity and groupthink.
"If you're a scientist and you make an observation which can be tested…then as a scientist you have to be honest because you'll soon be found out," Terence Kealey, a professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham, told Reason's Zach Weissmueller. "But if your money comes from the government and it comes by peer review from committees, and the committees subscribe to a false paradigm, no one is going to test your paradigm."
