Trump cut funding to develop heart pump for babies born with heart defects: report

President Donald Trump's ongoing effort to cut federal spending has translated into eliminating in-human clinical trials for "a tiny device [which] silently pumps fluid through a series of tubes and vessels that mimic the human heart."

Trump has been cutting federal funding to medical research funded by the National Institutes of Health, but even the Department of Defense is funding medical research at Cornell University for a life-saving heart pump for babies.

The Cornell Chronicle revealed this week that the Department of Defense accepted a proposal to conduct the clinical trials, but a week later, researchers were told the four-year funding was cut.

“Interruption of that funding has really brought us to a screeching halt,” said Professor James Antaki, at the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering. “If the interruption lasts very long, it would be irreversible. We’ll have to start laying off people, and I don’t think we’d be able to recover.”

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PediaFlow was crafted over 20 years ago with the aim of making a device, the report says, that is the size of an AA battery.

The project has been a 30-year "labor of love," Antaki said.

There are approximately 40,000 children born annually with some form of heart condition. That number isn't large enough for medical device companies in the private sector to fund their own research and development, so the federal government has been the investor.

“For that reason,” Antaki said, “our only option is federal funding, and it also explains why devices like this are not being developed in other countries because they don’t have the benefit of federal funding. We’ve been very fortunate to make it as far as we have because of federal funding.”

The report noted that a previous federal grant that began in 2019, under the first Trump administration, is wrapping up.

“The PediaFlow is intended for children with congenital and acquired heart disease,” Antaki said. “That means babies that are born with a hole in the heart or with a missing ventricle that need serious surgery to survive. Sometimes the child can’t survive to surgery and they need some kind of crutch to get them over that difficult period.”

There's also the matter of heart transplants. Babies born with such heart defects could get a new heart, but without a machine to keep their heart pumping, they may not make it until a heart becomes available, the report explained.

“Babies aren’t small adults,” Antaki said. “They have a different anatomy, different physiology. Their blood is more delicate. Their tissues are more delicate.”

Today “the project is on life support,” Antaki said.

Read the full report here.