{"slug": "california-wants-to-rescue-medical-research-voters-must-decide-if-its-worth-8-4", "title": "California wants to rescue medical research. Voters must decide if it’s worth $8.4 billion", "summary": "California voters will decide on an $8.4 billion bond measure to fund immunotherapy research, aiming to offset federal NIH cuts that have disrupted clinical trials and left patients like Laurie Adami without timely treatment. The initiative would support research for diseases including cancer and Alzheimer's, but critics warn it adds decades of state debt.", "body_md": "**Getting your**\n\n[Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...After 12 years of battling stage four blood cancer, Laurie Adami was out of options.\n\nShe had been diagnosed in 2006 — at age 46 — with late-stage follicular non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which has long been deemed incurable.\n\nBy 2018, doctors estimated she had over 8 pounds of cancerous tumors in her body and less than a month to live.\n\n“I think if it weren’t my own story, I might not believe it because it just seems so unreal,” said Adami, looking back now.\n\nAdami’s seventh and final treatment strategy was Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapy, commonly referred to as CAR-T. A form of cancer immunotherapy — which harnesses the body’s own immune system to recognize and stop disease — CAR-T genetically reprograms a patient’s white blood cells, to hunt and destroy cancer cells.\n\nWithin 30 days of receiving CAR-T, Adami was cancer-free.\n\n“That shows the power of this new treatment, which is like nothing else has ever been,” Adami said. “And if I hadn’t done CAR-T when I got it, I would’ve been dead within a month.”\n\nAdami had known of the life-saving impact CAR-T could have for struggling late-stage cancer patients like herself since 2012, but she was forced to wait six years to undergo the treatment because of delays in research and no clinical trials for her type of cancer, she said.\n\nThat’s why Adami supports [California’s proposed $8.4 billion medical research bond,](https://ballotpedia.org/California_Establish_Immunology_and_Immunotherapy_Research_Institute_Initiative_(2026)#Text_of_measure) which would provide stable state funding for science. If approved by voters in November’s election, the California Immunology Research and Cures Initiative would fund research for immunotherapies, like CAR-T, to treat and prevent diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and other serious illnesses.\n\nCritics say the measure would commit the state to decades of debt for a narrow slice of science funding at a time when sweeping funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health — the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world — are hitting universities and labs and threaten the future of healthcare.\n\nOver the course of last year, the Trump administration froze or cut at least $2.3 billion in previously approved and unspent NIH grants — canceling hundreds of research grants on topics including LGBTQ+ and minority healthcare, HIV treatment, COVID-19, global immunizations and child vaccinations.\n\nThe measure carries particular stakes in the Bay Area, [where universities and medical centers have lost more than $55 million in canceled federal grants](https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/05/bay-area-universities-federal-funding-research-cuts/) and where researchers say cuts are already disrupting clinical trials, staffing and long-term research.\n\nLast year, the University of California estimated it had lost over $37 million, while California State University said it had lost at least $7 million.\n\n“Several of our patients had to stop their treatment in a clinical trial because the funding was gone,” said Adam Zarrin, the director of state government affairs at Blood Cancer United, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting blood cancer. “The same is happening for the researchers: ‘We’re in the middle of a trial, we’re in the middle of doing our work and now the federal government has taken action and we no longer have access to the resources that we need to continue this research.'”\n\nAdami, now a patient advocate who works to help others navigate their cancer diagnosis and care, said the funding cuts have had real impacts on the people and researchers she works with.\n\n“There was a family I knew who had a young child with leukemia who had failed everything and was in a clinical trial that got shut down because of the NIH cuts last year, and the child died,” she said.\n\nSupporters say California’s proposed bond would offset federal cuts and split the $8.4 billion to fund an immunology and immunotherapy research institute affiliated with the University of California and to fund a grant program for California-based public or nonprofit universities and medical research institutions.\n\nThe University of California declined to comment on the bond measure. [U](https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/03/05/university-of-california-sponsors-23-billion-research-funding-bill/)[C has been a strong advocate for a separate $23 billion bond measure](https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/03/05/university-of-california-sponsors-23-billion-research-funding-bill/) proposed by Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, that would create a state-level, taxpayer-funded institute similar to the NIH for university research. That bond failed to make the November ballot earlier this week.\n\nThe proposed immunology bond would not award any funds to for-profit organizations or pharmaceutical companies, and half of the $8.4 billion would go toward research on cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.\n\nThe bond would also mandate that 10% of all funds from the licensing of treatments would be returned to California to offset the total cost of the bond. It would cap state administrative costs at 2%, and any treatments developed under the measure would be required to be offered to Californians at least 20% below the national average price.\n\nThe research funding bond is backed by dozens of disease advocacy groups, including Blood Cancer United, the ALS Association, the Alzheimer’s Association and the Parkinson Association of Northern California. It is primarily financially backed and promoted by billionaire philanthropist and medical inventor Dr. Gary K. Michelson, who pledged $120 million in 2024 to launch the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, a UCLA-affiliated research center expected to open in 2027.\n\nOpposition to the measure has mainly centered on the structure of the funding, which would cost the state an estimated $500 million each year over a 25-year period to repay the bond, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. Opponents have also criticized the measure’s limited scope.\n\n“This approach risks turning research funding into a series of competing campaigns, leaving less visible but equally important conditions behind,” Robert M. Kaplan, an adjunct professor at the Stanford School of Medicine Clinical Excellence Research Center, [wrote in an opinion piece for the Sacramento Bee opposing the measure.](https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article315629674.html)\n\nWiener [also criticized the measure for being too narrow](https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2026/06/immunology-bond-qualifies-for-november-ballot-00973129?site=pro&prod=alert&prodname=alertmail&linktype=article&source=email), previously telling POLITICO that it should have been folded into his [$23 billion scientific research bond](https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/03/05/university-of-california-sponsors-23-billion-research-funding-bill/).\n\nBut supporters say the alternative funding source is crucial for California research impacted by federal cuts.\n\nShane Crotty, the chief science officer at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, said he’s seen researchers leave the country, and the field altogether, due to the slashed funds.\n\n“It feels like you’ve got a team of people rolling a boulder up a hill. So if you have a pause in the resources, some of those people are leaving, the boulder definitely starts going back down the hill and you’re just trying to hang in there until you can find that support again,” he said. “I think that’s what it feels like for a lot of people doing medical research right now.”\n\nCrotty said if passed, the measure would make a big difference for the health of Californians.\n\n“This type of investment in immune system medical research could really mean better health and better therapies for patients and can do so pretty quickly,” he said. “The federal situation has created a bottleneck for advances that are on the cusp from really moving forward.”\n\nAdami said the bond would also fund therapies that have the power to save the lives of people who are facing life-threatening diseases, as she once did.\n\n“This $8.4 billion is going to give us this huge leg up and get research kick-started where it should be and across all of our California research institutions and medical research facilities,” she said. “And why shouldn’t California lead immunotherapy research?”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/california-wants-to-rescue-medical-research-voters-must-decide-if-its-worth-8-4", "canonical_source": "https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/06/29/california-wants-to-rescue-medical-research-voters-must-decide-if-its-worth-8-4-billion/", "published_at": "2026-06-29 11:00:48+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-29 12:23:49.101151+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-research", "ai-policy", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["California", "National Institutes of Health", "University of California", "California State University", "Blood Cancer United", "Laurie Adami", "Adam Zarrin"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/california-wants-to-rescue-medical-research-voters-must-decide-if-its-worth-8-4", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/california-wants-to-rescue-medical-research-voters-must-decide-if-its-worth-8-4.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/california-wants-to-rescue-medical-research-voters-must-decide-if-its-worth-8-4.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/california-wants-to-rescue-medical-research-voters-must-decide-if-its-worth-8-4.jsonld"}}