In fiscal year 2014, NIH funded 164 projects that utilized fetal tissues for a total expenditure of $76 million, with our laboratory as the only NIH fetal tissue repository, being the primary resource for many of these projects.

A comprehensive resource for NIH-funded research projects, publications, and investigators.

Given this sustained decline, the increasing availability of validated alternative technologies, and the need to steward public resources in ways that most effectively drive innovation, NIH will no longer support research using human fetal tissue.

We collected all projects classified under the spending category “human fetal tissue” from FY2008 to FY2024 using NIH RePORTER, along with all publications associated with these awards. In...

If you believe you are using HFT in an active NIH-funded study but were not notified, please contact the IRB’s QA/QI Administrator Katie Schaffenberger for assistance.

For the purpose of this policy, human fetal tissue (HFT) is defined as tissue or cells obtained from a dead human embryo or fetus after a spontaneous or induced abortion, or after a stillbirth. The acquisition, storage, or research using HFT from elective abortions in the IRP is prohibited.

NIH has long maintained policies governing the responsible and limited use of human fetal tissue in biomedical research. However, NIH supported research using human fetal tissue has been in sharp decline since 2019, with only 77 projects supported in Fiscal Year 2024.

In 2019, the first Trump administration imposed restrictions on how the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds HFT research, which the Biden administration then partially rescinded...

Last week, the Trump administration announced it was banning the use of human fetal tissue from some abortions in federally funded medical research.

To inform this assessment, NIH is seeking public input to assess the utility of hESCs in biomedical research, specifically, areas of research that could not occur, or areas in which newer, validated models could serve as a replacement.