Research grant cancellations continue piling up at Pitt

Kris B. Mamula, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Aug 4, 2026

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PITTSBURGH — A federal agency that aims to make healthcare safer and less expensive has canceled two grants to University of Pittsburgh researchers, adding to the institution’s recent string of funding losses.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality canceled a grant worth about $2 million to Leslie P. Scheunemann, an assistant professor of medicine at Pitt, and a second $2.5 million grant to Lindsay M. Sabik, professor and vice chair for research in the Department of Health and Policy Management at Pitt’s School of Public Health, according to AcademyHealth, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that tracks funding.

Scheunemann, who is board certified in four medical specialties, was studying ways to improve the care of patients returning home from the hospital intensive care unit, which can be a difficult transition for patients and family.

She practices in the ICU units at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Oakland and other hospitals. She is an independent, early stage investigator and the AHRQ grant was her first as lead scientist.

Previous research has shown that up to half or more ICU patients develop physical impairments after leaving the hospital and 30% to 80% experience cognitive difficulties. That can have spillover effects on caregivers. The problem began to receive serious attention in the 1990s and the term Post-Intensive Care Syndrome was coined in 2010, attracting research interest.

Scheunemann did not return requests for comment.

Approximately 160 ICU patients and an equal number of their caregivers were to be recruited for Scheunemann’s study, which was in its second of five planned years when it was canceled in recent weeks.

The end of the study will leave unknown whether the interventions developed by Scheunemann and her colleagues could improve the transition home from the hospital after a stay in the ICU.

Sabik’s research was a national comparative study of the experiences of adults with advanced cancer at the end of life.

Using insurance claims, Sabik, and co-investigator, former Pitt physician Yael Schenker and colleagues, were focusing on how various state opioid prescribing policies affect access to pain management, especially for historically underserved patients.

Schenker has since left Pitt to become chief academic officer at Denver Health in Colorado. Sabik said Tuesday that communications with AHRQ unexpectedly ceased in December when her team anticipated receiving funding for the third year of a four-year study.

“We expected to receive the continued funding, but it never came in 2025,” she said. “We were hoping there were just delays and we tried to just keep it going for five or six months.”

Ultimately, the study ended and four staff members had to find other jobs, she said.

A prominent Pitt researcher, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak for the university, said Tuesday that the grant cancellations were part of a larger trend of the government slow-walking grant reviews and, in one case, suggesting that researchers cut a Pitt grant request by more than half.

A university spokesman declined to comment.

AHRQ, which was created by Congress in 1989, has canceled 111 grants nationally as of Monday, affecting $136.3 million in committed funds, according to AcademyHealth.

The total value of the affected awards was $254.5 million in 28 states, 11 in Pennsylvania alone.

Eric T. Roberts, an associate professor of general internal medicine and health economics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, was among the AHRQ grant recipients notified of the recent cancellations.

He said the unexpected end of funding was part of a larger slowdown at the agency, where review panels have been dissolved.

“No new grants are being reviewed and existing grants are not getting their continued funding,” he said. “Trials have to be stopped midway through. Ongoing research has stopped. Training grants are stopped. It’s frustrating.”

The cancellation of grants is generally rare, he said, and usually for very specific reasons. Word of these AHRQ cancellations came in identical messages to researchers, saying the projects “didn’t align with administration priorities.”

Officials at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees AHRQ, were not immediately available for comment.

Unlike the National Institutes of Health, which mostly funds research dealing with diseases and new treatments, AHRQ primarily focuses on studying ways to make healthcare safer and more affordable.

AHRQ had a budget of $496 million in 2025, a fraction of the $48 billion to $50 billion distributed by NIH annually.

Shifting priorities in government-funded research policies since President Donald Trump took office 18 months ago threatens Pitt’s ranking in National Institutes of Health funding, which was seventh in the U.S. in 2025 at $669.7 million.

Research grants and contracts accounted for more than one-third of Pitt’s $3 billion operating revenue in 2024 and the cancellation of 100 Pitt NIH and other grants since Trump took office has cost the university at least $35 million.

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