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Dozens of researchers funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality received notices last week that they would not receive future installments of funding for their ongoing research grants. While frustrating, the development was largely not a surprise to these researchers, many of whom had been waiting months for renewed funding or been unable to get explanations as to why the funding spigots had run dry from staffers at the agency.

The notices punctuated nearly a year of uncertainty for health services researchers funded by AHRQ and left those who lost funding concerned about the future of their field. AcademyHealth , a professional organization representing health services researchers, has confirmed at least 78 grants worth $200 million have been affected. In all, those grants had $109.2 million in funding remaining, it estimated.

Grant recipients were told in a letter of “non-award” that “AHRQ is adjusting its discretionary health services research award portfolio in order to better prioritize agency resources towards the above-mentioned priorities to best serve the interests of the Federal Government,” according to one such letter reviewed by STAT. The letter states the agency is prioritizing research on patient safety, antibiotic resistance, AI, long Covid, nutrition, and understanding autism, among others.

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LĀHAINĀ, Hawai‘i — About once a month, Alika Maunakea and Ruben Juarez and their staff fly medical equipment from the University of Hawai‘i on O‘ahu to the west side of Maui. On the edge of the Lāhainā burn zone, the two researchers transform the local health center into an impromptu lab. They collect blood, urine, DNA, and health measures like mental health and lung function scores for the Maui Wildfire Exposure Study or MauiWES, one of the largest and most comprehensive postfire investigations in the country.

Scientists still understand little about how wildfire exposure harms health, particularly wildland and urban ones like the fires that burned down Lāhainā and thousands of acres on Maui in August 2023. The hope is that data collected over the decade after the fire will show how to better mitigate the risk of cancers, lung diseases, or other health conditions that have been linked to fire exposure. It’s also knowledge that’s urgently needed, as the threat of wildfire is growing throughout Western states and beyond.

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Science word of the day: Abiogenesis

Pronunciation: Ay-bye-oh-JEN'-ih-sis

What it means: Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving matter through chemical processes. Scientists still don't know exactly how abiogenesis happened on Earth. Theories range from lightning strikes that could have scrambled water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen into amino acids and sugars ‪—‬ the building blocks of life ‪—‬ to chemical reactions at deep-sea vents. Abiogenesis is not the same as spontaneous generation, which held that living organisms such as maggots formed directly from decaying matter. It was a compelling idea for anyone who had watched meat rot, but Louis Pasteur, inventor of pasteurization, disproved it in the 1860s by showing that microbes could only grow from preexisting microbes .

How to use it in a sentence: All life on Earth may owe itself to an incident of abiogenesis more than 3.7 billion years ago .

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word ?

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A long-awaited moment in preventive cardiology arrived last week, when enlicitide (which Merck is selling under the name Lipfendra) was approved by the FDA to lower blood cholesterol levels.

As the first oral PCSK9 inhibitor — powerful cholesterol-lowering medications, that, until now, have only been injectable — enlicitide itself is an impressive achievement. It punctuates a story of pharmaceutical innovation that has glided from the stories of families enrolled in the Dallas Heart Study at the bedside, to drug targets discovered at the lab bench, all ultimately transforming care back at the bedside.

It also comes at an opportune time. With new clinical guidelines supporting a more aggressive approach to lowering cholesterol levels, enlicitide may be particularly useful for people with either established or at high risk for cardiovascular disease. For the millions of Americans who fit into these groups, it has already been hailed as a game changer . But the story here — of whom it would actually help, and what it implies about prevention today — is more complicated.

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