A new analysis of federal funding for RNA vaccine research highlights the vast potential of the technology not just for preventing infectious diseases but treating devastating conditions ranging from cancer to Alzheimer’s.
Researchers led by UVA Health’s Taison Bell, MD, MBA, surveyed RNA vaccine research funded by the National Institutes of Health using the agency’s grant database, known as RePORTER (Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools). He and his collaborators identified 178 active grants that started between 1997 and 2025, totaling $1.65 billion in funding. The top three areas of study were viruses, RNA technology and cancer.
Among the virus grants, the most frequently funded areas of research were COVID-19 (29 grants) and, close behind, HIV (24 grants). Among cancers, the most grants went to the study of solid tumors (eight grants) and melanoma (three grants). But there were a wide array of other potential applications in the mix, targeting everything from tick-borne illnesses and parasitic infections to eye disease and syphilis.
“NIH funding for RNA vaccination research is broad and covers more than just COVID-19 research,” said UVA researcher Adishesh K. Narahari, MD, PhD. “This research provides critical advances in infectious disease, cancer biology and molecular biology. Halting funding to this entire sector of research will be devastating to the biomedical research complex as a whole.”
The researchers have published their analysis in the scientific journal JAMA Network Open. The article is open access, meaning it is free to read. The research team consisted of Chandrabhatla, Narahari, Kevin Jin, Benjamin Mazurek and Bell. The researchers have no financial interest in the work.
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