As biomedical research at NIH faces an existential threat from the Trump administration, an entrepreneur is winning over allies for what he describes as a “simple idea” that could introduce a massive new infusion of money for innovation in medicine.

Lou Weisbach, a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a political insider, wants the federal government to issue $750 billion in bonds over six years to fund an enterprise dubbed the American Centers for Cures, and he is working to bring this issue to the White House. Should Trump wish to call this initiative the Trump American Center for Cures, that’s definitely on the table, Weisbach says.

The idea is not new. Weisbach has been working with Richard J. Boxer, a urologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine and a member of the National Cancer Advisory Board, have been pushing for legislation to float the bond and establish the centers for close to a quarter century, getting some (but not enough) traction.

However, today, as the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency are remaking the U.S. biomedical research enterprise, support for the idea appears to be on the rise, as former skeptics and those who had been too busy to pay attention say that the plan for the American Centers for Cures warrants serious consideration. 

“The response over the last three or four weeks from the medical community and the research community has been remarkable to me as somebody who’s worked on this for a long time,” Weisbach said to The Cancer Letter soon after presenting the concept at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. “People get it. People get that we haven’t gotten the job done, and not because we don’t have great people working on it, but we are in a system that doesn’t work.

“I thought that what he was proposing was intriguing,” Dr. Steve Rosen said to The Cancer Letter. “Obviously, it was something that was very ambitious, but the potential benefits to humanity were enormous.  And the key issue was coming up with the appropriate funding and to do it in a manner that was almost like the Manhattan Project, where you’re going to have a devoted team with a business mentality, with goals, deadlines, and the appropriate resources and metrics to follow with the ultimate goal of commercializing discoveries that would be a return on the investment from the bonds that were going to be issued to generate the revenue."

Another supporter, Sorena Nadaf-Rahrov, said that he agrees that the U.S. biomedical research and the healthcare system is long overdue for an overhaul. More than a liferaft, Nadaf-Rahrov describes the American Center for Cures as a way to turn this period of chaos into an opportunity to change biomedical research for the better.  "Politics aside, I get it. Resources are tight. This country is trillions of dollars in debt, but our largest expense in this country is tied to healthcare. And so, if we continue in the same direction we’ve been going for years and years and years, is there going to be any significant change? Especially with the funding rates on the decline, potentially evaporating, it would be the worst day for any patient suffering from any disease when research for their disease has gone away. I can’t even imagine. These experiments must happen. In my opinion, for healthcare and academia and organizations like ours—and people like me who stand behind them—"

Link to full Article on The Cancer Letter:  https://cancerletter.com/the-cancer-letter/20250620_1/