19.05.2025 Researchers from China and five other ‘countries of concern’ barred from NIH databases

Trump administration escalates efforts to keep sensitive data from foreign adversaries.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has barred scientists in China and five other “countries of concern” from accessing 21 biomedical databases, which hold information on genetic variation, cancer cases, neurodegenerative diseases, and more. The 2 April move by President Donald Trump’s administration, which ramps up a longer running effort to prevent foreign access to data deemed sensitive, also halts projects involving the databases that include collaborators in the named countries. “At a time when the study of genetic variation is fundamental to pinpointing the causes and cures of diseases, this seems like a pointless expression of spite,” says Pedro Antonio Valdés Sosa, a neuroinformaticist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China who has used an affected database on child brain development for his research. Targeted databases include ones that are “crucial to understand brain disorders,” he says. The other countries shut out of the databases are Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. “This could be really devastating to the few remaining good scientists in Venezuela,” says Gladys Maestre, a Venezuelan-born neuroscientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who collaborates on Alzheimer’s disease research with scientists in her home country. “You need real data from real people to test your hypotheses.”

Source: ScienceInsider
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