Amy Bei, a professor of epidemiology at Yale University, received the cancellation notice from the federal government on May 1.
The $300,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health was for the first phase of research into a method for tracking malaria spread through communities. Bei had been finishing up that first phase when the notice came through.
It wasn’t Bei’s first brush with federal funding cuts to research this year.
In January, she’d received a stop-work order from the federal government for a separate project in the central African country of Chad, where she was helping local laboratories introduce new technologies and build capacity for genomic surveillance across the country. She was told she could keep working temporarily on a limited basis, then she received the official cancellation notice in June. The project was funded through the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.
Bei’s grants are only two of many at Yale and other Connecticut universities that have been cancelled or paused — or for which funding is expected to run out and not be renewed.
According to Lindsay DiStefano, the University of Connecticut’s interim vice president for research, innovation, and entrepreneurship, the school had lost $41 million in cancelled grants and nonrenewals as of mid-October. The university has been able to provide about $1.6 million of its own money in the short term for certain projects, according to DiStefano.
Michael Crair, Yale’s vice provost for research, said 50 grants had been cancelled as of Aug. 12. An additional 22 were either partially cancelled or ordered to pause, and 14 more were told they would not be receiving future funding. Crair said the cancellations amounted to “tens of millions of dollars” in research funds.
“The loss of federal funding has delayed, halted, and put at risk research essential to advancing life-saving medical breakthroughs, scientific discovery, humanitarian aid, and technological innovation, among other important work,” Crair wrote in an emailed statement.
Real-world effects of laboratory cuts
At Yale, Bei has been researching malaria spread in Africa since the early 2000s, when she went to Tanzania to study drug resistance and evaluate potential candidates for malaria vaccines. She said the experience changed her life.
“It really made me realize, this is not just a problem that we’re trying to tackle in a Petri dish, but this is truly a disease that has a just unbelievable toll in communities,” she said.
Bei said when she began working in the field, the medical interventions to fight malaria were limited, and people were getting very sick. Although there’s been a lot of scientific progress since then, Bei said, the parasite has adapted to evade interventions like vaccines and medications.
“Whether you look at death, you look at morbidity, you look at days lost from school, or days lost from going to work, there’s so many different impacts that malaria has on everything from loss of life to even loss of being able to live and be a productive member of society,” said Bei.
According to data from the World Health Organization’s 2024 report, Senegal reported about 1.2 million cases of malaria and 200 deaths from the disease in 2023.
Malaria is a parasite, which makes it particularly challenging to vaccinate against. The parasite goes through different life cycle phases and displays genetic variations, making it difficult to narrow down a single target that can be used to protect against all infections. When it reproduces inside a human being, Bei said, the new parasites can appear differently in the body than the ones the mosquito originally transmitted, making the disease unpredictable for anyone trying to develop a vaccine.
The biomarkers Bei’s project was researching, which originate in a mosquito’s saliva, have several uses. The presence or absence of certain biomarkers can indicate whether government interventions to prevent malaria spread — for instance, widespread distribution of mosquito nets sprayed with bug repellant — are actually preventing people from being bitten.
The markers are particularly useful in geographic regions where most people aren’t showing symptoms of malaria, but the disease is still being transmitted, Bei said. As people become accustomed to the parasite, they are able to contract it without experiencing symptoms, hiding the fact that the disease may still be alive and well within particular communities.
“We have these areas of the country, and this has actually happened in Senegal, where you think there’s very little transmission going on, but actually there’s sustained transmission that is just kind of going under the radar, or because people are not coming in in a symptomatic way to clinics, but yet they’re still transmitting the parasite between individuals,” said Bei.
Bei said a future goal would be to develop biomarkers that can distinguish between different types of mosquitos spreading the parasite.
Finding ways to continue the research
Since the grant cancellations, Bei said she’s gotten funding from the philanthropic arm of Tito’s Handmade Vodka to continue some parts of the NIH-funded work tracking malaria spread.
Tito’s philanthropic arm and a few internal grants from Yale have also enabled her team to keep up the USAID-funded project in Chad, including a training her lab is offering on using genomic surveillance — observing how parasite genomes evolve in response to malarial interventions — to track malaria.
Still, the loss of funding was disruptive.
Natasha Turyasingura, a Ph.D. student from Uganda who is working on the Chad project, said she was planning to travel to Africa this past February to train local researchers in how to use a newly developed DNA sequencing panel to analyze the genetic makeup of malaria parasites found in blood samples that researchers collected from different parts of the country.
With a new vaccine recently available, the scientists were trying to understand ways the parasite might evolve to escape the effects of the vaccine, as well as forms of malaria that don’t appear on diagnostic tests or have become drug-resistant.
But the U.S. government’s order to stop work on the project postponed the trip by nearly a year, as Bei searched for funding to continue the research. With those funds now secured, they plan to travel to Chad in December.
For Turyasingura, the Trump administration’s new priorities have also hit her personally. The length of her visa was shortened from one year to three months, making it more challenging for her to travel and conduct research outside the U.S.
Meanwhile, other facets of the project in Chad were thrown into limbo. Efforts to meet with village representatives and community members to educate people about the benefits of vaccination, which were being supported through the USAID grant, are now severely limited.
Bei also continues to relieve additional NIH funding for an effort to develop a “next generation” malaria vaccine.
The World Health Organization recently approved two vaccines, one in 2021 and one in 2023, to be used in countries where malaria is widespread. But Bei noted that the vaccines have a low rate of efficacy. According to a 2024 World Health Organization paper, the 2021 vaccine was between 45% and 51% efficient in preventing malaria, and the 2023 vaccine was between 66% and 75% efficient. And that protection decreases over time.
(By comparison, the vaccine commonly given for measles is 97% effective after two doses.)
Laty Gaye Thiam, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal, which collaborates with Yale on the malaria research, said the vaccine they are developing will attempt to complement existing vaccines by targeting a different stage of the parasite’s life cycle. As part of this work, he said, they are looking at the antibodies produced by people who are immune to the disease and identifying the antigens that those antibodies are responding to, in order to understand what factors are protecting those people from the disease.
Bei said they planned to combine the research that Thiam and others in the lab are doing with her biomarker research to create a broad “panel” that will give researchers more information about malaria spread.
Thiam, who is originally from Senegal, said he’s seen firsthand the damage caused by malaria. He’s had it himself several times.
“Having suffered from that, and also being close to kids and infants that are suffering … from our field work, it is really a devastating disease … You can see that it has a huge impact, not only on the child who is sick, but even the mother or the dad who’s carrying that sick child. You can feel the burden of the disease.”
Cyrianne Keutcha, a Cameroon native and postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Public Health who works in Bei’s lab in Senegal, said she remembers coming down with malaria around age 11. It was a case severe enough to keep her in the hospital for two weeks.
Keutcha is working with Thiam on the research into next generation malaria vaccines. She is testing whether a potential new malaria vaccine developed in the United Kingdom will be effective against the parasites found in the blood of people who are living in places like Senegal, where malaria is prevalent. Keutcha is looking to see if any natural variations in these parasites can escape the effects of the potential vaccine. The vaccine in the UK is in the early stages of being tested on volunteers.
Keutcha said that much of the research they were doing on malaria could also be used to understand other diseases, ones that are prevalent in the U.S.
“You are investing in knowledge that can significantly improve the wellbeing of a group of people that you may not know. However, that same technology can be used to significantly improve your well-being as well for another disease that is to come or that’s already present,” she said.
Emilia Otte is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2025 © The Connecticut Mirror.