On March 30th, James Antaki, a biomedical engineering professor at Cornell University, was awarded a $6.7 million grant from the Department of Defense. The grant would help with his team’s production and testing of PediaFlow, a device meant to boost the blood flow of infants with heart defects.
A little over a week later, on April 8th, the DoD sent Antaki a stop-work order informing him that his team would not be receiving the money, which was meant to be distributed over the course of 4 years. The order gave no reason beyond it simply being “at the direction of the Administration.”
Antaki has since said that he had no idea why the funding was cut. On May 9th, he gave his first interview since losing funding, saying: “I feel that it’s my calling in life to complete this project. Once a week, I go through this mental process of, ‘Is it time to give up?’ But it is not my prerogative to give up.” The DoD and White House have both refused to comment on the situation.
1 in 100 babies in the U.S. are born with heart defects, and a quarter of those need surgery or other procedures in their first year in order to survive, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. PediaFlow is a device that uses a propeller to increase the infant’s blood flow, helping them to receive surgery or live at home until a donor heart is available. The DoD’s funding would have supported further testing of the prototype, including being placed on an animal.
Dr. Evan Zahn, a pediatric interventional cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles who is unaffiliated with PediaFlow, has said that cutting the funding is a step backward for children’s healthcare due to how few commercially available options there are for babies with heart defects. “Technology specifically designed for our children, particularly babies across the board, is desperately needed, so losing funding for something like that is a real loss.”
Antaki says that if the funding isn’t restored in the next 90 days, he and his team will need to start laying off lab staff, and PhD students will have to change their research focus. In the grand scheme of what the government funds, “it’s a small amount of money that could do so much good for so many people, and it’s just the right thing to do. It just kind of speaks for itself.”
