AURORA, Colo. — A recent executive order has terminated research funding for two University of Colorado College of Nursing assistant professors studying how to connect people with HIV with the most effective medication.
Samantha Stonbraker and Christine Tagliaferri Rael were working with scientists who develop lifesaving medication to treat HIV with patients lacking access to treatment.
“When scientists make highly effective medications against HIV, sometimes the people who really need to use those don't have the ability to either access them, or they have a different side effect profile that maybe isn't useful for patients, or they don't know how to get the medication," Stonbraker explained. "So, Christine and I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that the people who really need the medications can really access them."
Tagliaferri Rael said they primarily work with transgender women because 14% of transgender women in the U.S. are currently living with HIV.
“As we start to look at racial and ethnic demographics more specifically, about 24% of American Latina transgender women are living with HIV, and nearly half of all... American transgender women are currently living with HIV in 2025,” Rael said.
But Stonbraker and Rael said their work with those demographics led to the termination of their grant funding, worth nearly $1 million.
“At the end of March, we received termination letters from the federal government to stop... much of our work," Rael said. "The terminations were related to the executive orders that affect transgender women and transgender health, including transgender health research. Our work focuses on HIV. We're not working on gender identity or anything like that. We are focused on one of the populations that is most deeply impacted by HIV, and that is a conscious decision. Because by concentrating our resources and efforts in this population, we're able to... use taxpayer dollars most efficiently, because we can ensure that we get the products and medications and tests that we develop to those populations in a cost-effective, sustainable, efficient way."
During his first presidential term in 2019, President Donald Trump pledged to end HIV in the United States by 2030.
But now, with sweeping federal health cuts and slashed research funding, advocates fear that decades of progress could be erased.
Rael said the official reason they were given was that their research priorities no longer effectuate the priorities of the National Institutes of Health.
“Because we are focused on transgender women — which they said is unscientific and has little benefit to Americans in general, which is wholly untrue," Rael said. "We are focused on this population because of the prevalence of HIV and the HIV risk that's disproportionately shouldered by these women."
Stonbraker said without the funding they cannot move forward with their research.
“The NIH funds the most research by far out of any other country in the world," Stonbraker said. "And so really continuing this work without the funding to do so is almost impossible. Once we receive those letters, you have to stop working on those grants. And so we can try and find other ways to get funding for this work, but it's really hard. No one else is really set up to do it at that scale. So, in some senses, no, we can't continue the work, but HIV isn't going away."
Rael said this move will have a huge financial impact.
“Every case of HIV that we can prevent is about $229,000 in health care savings. So, if we can prevent a million infections, which is our goal, through this work, we can save about $229 billion and we're not the only ones affected by this, right? These were sweeping cuts throughout the field of HIV research. So, we're talking bench scientists, who are the people that are in the lab making these medications — they saw huge cuts too, which is going to result in delayed innovations,” Rael said “We will start to see viral mutations in treatment resistance, which eventually means that our drugs here will no longer work. “
Stonebraker said the termination of funding comes at a time when researchers are close to eradicating HIV.
“If given enough funding, we would be able to really stop this condition from spreading to so many people. And now we're going to go backwards. We're going to go back to the 80s and the 90s, when it was really killing a lot of people… was a death sentence,” Stonbraker said.
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