The federal government will stop funding what it determines to be “dangerous” gain-of-function research conducted in the U.S. and abroad after implementing a new policy.
The “Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research” lands during broader upheaval in federal research funding. Between March and June 2025, the NIH terminated more than 2,500 grants and at least $3.2 billion in funding. Federal judges have ordered some of those cuts reversed.
Seven notes on the new policy:
1. The policy bars federal support for what it calls “dangerous” gain-of-function, or DGOF, research. It defines two categories of research posing the highest risk: DGOF research and international research of concern.
Gain-of-function research involves genetically altering a function of an organism, according to the American Society for Microbiology. The group notes the technique has aided vaccine and cancer research and that experiments raising biosafety concerns are “an extremely small subset” of the field.
2. The policy is designed to fulfill Executive Order 14292, “Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research,” signed May 5, 2025. The policy itself is dated July 20 and was announced July 28 in an HHS news release.
3. It replaces the 2024 federal policy for oversight of dual-use research of concern and pathogens with enhanced pandemic potential, along with earlier 2012, 2014 and 2017 frameworks. HHS framed the move as a shift from a list-based approach, which regulated specific pathogens, to a risk-based one.
4. DGOF research is defined as work that makes a biological agent more dangerous across seven outcomes, including enhancing an agent’s harm, undermining vaccines or immunity, conferring resistance to therapeutics, increasing transmissibility, altering host range and reconstituting an eradicated or extinct agent. The definition explicitly includes creating “mirror organisms.”
5. Research with “potential” DGOF characteristics can still receive federal funding, but only after an independent third-party review body clears it. The international research of concern category blocks funding for work conducted in unspecified “countries of concern” or with “entities of concern.”
6. Principal investigators must attest in writing whether their proposed work qualifies as DGOF, and institutions must establish an institutional review entity and name an internal contact for such research. Violations or false attestations can trigger revoked funding and up to five years of ineligibility for federal life sciences funds.
7. Federal agencies have 90 days to establish the review body and 120 days to publish a list of entities of concern and issue implementation guidance; institutions have 180 days to build their review structures. The policy does not prohibit development of medical countermeasures or international collaboration.
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