The Daily Illini featured Rohit Bhargava, Director of the Cancer Center at Illinois and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering in a 2025 story about how federal funding cuts could affect life-saving research on cancer, a leading cause of death worldwide. 

In an interview on Feb. 5, The DI caught up with Bhargava to see how cancer research at the University fared and what changes are coming to the funding scheme for federally-supported research in the coming year. This interview was edited for clarity.

The DI: Last year you said cancer research (at the University) could be significantly affected by a loss of funding from the federal government. Did this happen?

Bhargava: So, the way the budget process works is that the President proposes a budget and then Congress actually allocates the funding. Last year, the administration proposed a 40% reduction of NIH (funds); it proposed a reduction in so-called “indirect costs.” 

Indirect costs are costs that pay for the building, for electricity, for water, safety audits, things like that. So cutting them impairs your ability to do research. If you have the so-called “direct costs,” those directly pay for supplies for research: the student salaries, who actually does the research and so on. So cutting that by 40% means we have only 60% capacity for doing research that we had prior to the cut. 

Cutting the indirect costs means we have less money to pay for water, for example, so we’d have to find some other money to pay the water bills.

So luckily what Congress has just passed — our timing is perfect because this happened (recently) — is keeping the NIH budget fairly constant. There’s just a very small increase, but at least we’re not falling behind. 

But there’s a bigger issue of uncertainty that remains. We don’t complete educational degrees in a year or six months, so if there’s a Ph.D. student who comes in and is starting to work on a really important cancer project, they need to know they will be supported for a few years, otherwise you cannot take on research that lasts for that long. 

The administrative actions last year caused a little bit of uncertainty which meant we couldn’t plan for experiments, we couldn’t recruit students effectively and so on. 

The DI: Would you say it’s been a uniquely hard year for the Cancer Center then? 

Bhargava: It’s been a tough year, because you have difficulty understanding where we take our limited resources that we have. We’re very grateful to the campus and our philanthropic supporters to support cancer research, but when you have a limited amount of money and there is a crisis looming, you are not able to invest it in cancer research, supporting students and so on. As a consequence, the overall impact (of the funding cuts) on cancer research has been negative. Projects that should have moved at a certain speed did not move at that speed. Long-term projects were not started in many cases and were delayed. Those are all things that are lingering still. 

The DI: Can you tell me what those projects are? 

Bhargava: I don’t want to point out individual (Principal Investigators), but for example, there are new emerging ideas around making tumor models in the lab. Right now we have drugs, we take a guess on a patient, maybe we do some molecular testing and then we give the patient a drug. 

One very futuristic idea is: we take cells from the patient, make hundreds of tumors in the lab, test out drug combinations in the lab and make the best combination available to the patient. That’s a great project, but it has many, many years of work ahead of us. 

The University has the engineering expertise to develop a project like this. But we can’t launch that transformative step if there’s uncertainty. It will take a large team to accomplish a goal like this. We’re capable; we have the science. But to put a team together is very risky if you don’t know if members of that team will be supported tomorrow. We were not able to initiate or even continue projects that are truly impactful, or transformative, but we are trying to continue science that is possible in the current funding scenario. 

The DI: Could you tell more about the budget that was just passed yesterday? 

Bhargava: The good news is there is a modest increase for the National Cancer Institute, so I think everyone realizes in Congress the importance of cancer research and the importance of supporting the progress we’ve already made. If you just think about it, a third fewer (cancer patients) would be living right now if we had the same standard of care that we had a couple of decades ago. If you know three cancer patients, imagine one of them not being at the party. 

I think today we are perhaps the best we’ve ever been (in cancer research). There are some truly very exciting things. And this unique convergence of computer science, AI, advances in basic biology like CRISPR and the ability to modulate biology, has brought us, in my opinion, to a tipping point where we can do things in cancer that can be truly impactful. 

This is not the time to step back. The problem has not been solved, and we are more hopeful than ever that there are truly breakthroughs ahead. 

The DI: Is the Cancer Center having trouble attracting international students and cancer scholars? 

Bhargava: Yes. For a variety of reasons. One is the perception that U.S. science is not supported. In reality, in terms of funding, we’re about the same, but the perception is we’re falling behind. The second is the perception, also rooted in reality, that immigration is too difficult. People are not able to get appointments for visas and things like that. The third is the funding uncertainty. Imagine you’re an international student, you use your life savings and come here, and you’re out of a job because the funding was cut. Now what do you do? 

All of these elements together keep some of the brightest minds away. And the people who can afford to stay away are those in demand. The same talent that we want is the talent other countries want. What we’re losing is absolutely the brightest people. 

So actually, I’m not sure in terms of numbers … but in terms of quality, it’s devastating. 

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