The prospect of reduced funding, more stringent conflict-of-interest policies and research reproducibility are among the growing challenges to sustained US leadership in biomedical translation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank C. R. Green and M. Y. Trigiani for reading this manuscript and providing valuable feedback. The Gourdie lab at Virginia Tech is supported by NIH grants 1R35 HL161237 (RGG PI) and R44CA272078 (S. R. Marsh, PI; R.G.G., subaward PI). The Gourdie lab is also supported by gifts from the Red Gates Foundation and Heywood Fralin and family. The funders had no role in manuscript preparation, information collection and the decision to publish.
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R.G.G. is a co‑founder, shareholder, company officer and board member of The Tiny Cargo Company, Inc., which is developing milk exosome‑based therapeutics originating from his academic laboratory; related intellectual property is licensed from Virginia Tech and targets ischemic heart injury, lethal radiation injury and radiation‑therapy side effects. R.G.G. is a co‑founder, shareholder, company officer and board member of Acomhal Research, Inc., which is developing the JM2 peptide under licenses from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) for glioblastoma and breast cancer. R.G.G. is a co‑founder and shareholder of Xequel Bio, Inc. (formerly FirstString Research, Inc.), which is developing the αCT1 peptide for wound‑healing indications; JM2 and αCT1 were invented in his laboratory, with related intellectual property licensed from MUSC, his former academic institution. R.G.G. and/or his institutions are associated with issued and pending patents related to the above technologies; details can be found in the Supplementary Information.
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Gourdie, R.G. Balancing innovation and integrity: the biomedical research ecosystem at a crossroads. Nat Biotechnol 44, 189–192 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-025-02996-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-025-02996-z
