Every summer for the past 25 years, the Shakespeare Ranch in South Lake Tahoe has opened its gates for a festival and rodeo.

But the event isn’t just about bull riding, barrel racing or barbecue.

It’s hosted by the Keep Memory Alive Foundation as a creative way to fund neurological research into degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s at the foundation’s Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas.

The rodeo is one example of the many 5K runs, galas and other fundraisers in Nevada and across the country that are sponsored by foundations, nonprofits and professional societies to raise research funds.

While more visible, these kinds of fundraisers are a small part of the research funding pie. An analysis from the nonprofit medical and health research advocacy alliance Research!America indicates that this kind of funding makes up about 1.2 percent of all the medical research spending in the United States. That’s good for the fourth largest source of medical research spending after industry (66 percent), the federal government (25.1 percent) and academic and research institutions (6.9 percent).

It’s federal threats to that second category of federal government-backed spending for research (the majority of which stems from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)) that has experts and health care professionals worried.

“There’s no way foundations can fill the gap,” said Ellie Dehoney, senior vice president of policy and advocacy for Research!America. “[Research infrastructure] is like a bridge. If you ignore it, it’s going to degrade and collapse. If we let certain university labs languish, and then more and more of them languish, we’re going to lose years and decades of progress.”

The Trump administration has discussed cuts to NIH funding (which has historically been supported by both sides of the political aisle), considered changes to the funding allocations and shifted policies that led to delays in the allocation of grant dollars from the NIH.

If cuts to research funding go through, the problem could compound in Nevada, which receives significantly less NIH funding than most states (ahead of only Alaska and Wyoming) likely stemming from its relatively limited number of research institutions.

The state has attempted to steadily increase investment at its research universities and institutions in the last few decades, including the Legislature’s establishment of a higher education research and development fund in 2011 and a funding mechanism for it in 2014. 

Lawmakers over the past decade have also regularly approved sending state dollars to various nonprofits and research entities, including the Lou Ruvo Center.

The investments, along with other changes, helped UNLV and UNR receive the prestigious Category “R1” or “Very High Research” classification in 2018. 

UNR and UNLV are also the recipients of the majority of NIH research grants in the Silver State — and have the most to lose if that funding source dries up.

Dehoney and other experts interviewed by The Nevada Independent said the funding for research not only leads to innovations, but also benefits patients by offering them cutting-edge medical treatments or clinical trials, attracts students wanting research-intensive universities and draws medical providers to a state with a provider shortage.

Of the more than $32 million that Nevada received in NIH funding for 77 projects in the 2024 fiscal year, Research!America estimates that it generated nearly $200 million in economic activity, including supporting 890 jobs. In 2024, NIH reported that every dollar of its funding generated approximately $2.46 in economic activities. 

Those in the field say NIH funding offers benefits beyond industry-sponsored research funding. 

Thomas Kozel, a professor of microbiology and immunology at UNR, has conducted NIH-funded research since the late 1970s and, as part of his research, he helped develop a diagnostic process for identifying people with AIDS who would benefit from anti-fungal treatment. 

He said NIH funding has driven every major advancement made in the life sciences in the last 50 years, including immunotherapy for cancer.

“At the end of the day, investors will end up picking it up, but investors need the initial discoveries before they're going to put their money in the game,” he said.

Galvanizing medical research in Nevada

Receiving NIH funding is not an easy task. 

Heather Pierce, the senior director for science policy and regulatory counsel at the Association of American Medical Colleges, said as few as 10 percent of applications for NIH grants are accepted. Oftentimes, researchers need to have a proof of concept first before receiving grant funding.

Though it will never be able to substitute the funding the federal government offers, she said private philanthropy from groups such as the Keep Memory Alive Foundation can give researchers a way to jumpstart projects they can then use to apply for NIH grants. 

Funds raised at its annual rodeo and other events support research through the foundation, which has raised more than $5.4 million since its inception in 2009 to support emerging science projects at the clinic. That funding, it says, resulted in more than $26.1 million in downstream external research funding and 250 scientific papers. 

Nevada is the third fastest aging state in the country, where an estimated 54,900 residents have Alzheimer’s disease — a number that is expected to double by 2060.

Though there’s limited NIH-funded research in Nevada relative to other states, the Lou Ruvo Center has received several NIH funding grants, including one with UNLV awarded to biomedical research centers in U.S. states with historically low levels of NIH funding.

Dr. Robert Fox, a staff neurologist at the Ruvo Center and Vice Chair of Research at Cleveland Clinic's Neurological Institute, said the total amount of federal funding going into medical research may be decreasing, and researchers need to prepare for that. 

“As a recipient of federal research funds, it is a little worrisome for the program that there's reduced funding,” Fox said. “When we look to the future of scarcity of federal dollars for medical research funds, it means we need to be even sharper. We need to be even more savvy in how we go about and seek those grant funds.”

The center’s founder, Las Vegas businessman Larry Ruvo, said the facility is only able to conduct research and provide the free care it does to patients and families thanks to philanthropy and grant funding. The facility operates with an annual deficit of $4 million.

The center was built in honor of Ruvo’s father, who lived in Las Vegas and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1992 after more than 18 months of doctor’s appointments and misdiagnoses. 

Without facilities in Nevada that could treat him, Ruvo’s father had to travel to California for care. 

“The old adage in 1992, was ‘pain, get on a plane’ and you go elsewhere,” Ruvo said. “People now that have a pain get on a plane and come to Las Vegas. It's just the opposite.”

‘You can't turn it on and off like a spigot’

Blaine Harper, a staff research associate for UNR, said she’s already felt the effects of federal uncertainty around grant funding. 

She started state service in 2022 in an NIH-supported, fully funded grant position focused on cardiovascular research. When the budget year changed and money from the grant didn’t arrive on time, she had to take a different state-funded research job on another part of campus focused on engineering. 

“I love supporting laboratory research — that's what brought me to UNR,” said Harper, speaking as a member of the American Federation of State County Municipal Employees Local 4041. “I have known so many of my colleagues working in laboratories in the classified staff of Nevada, who … are worried about how to support research and continue to make progress.”

Pierce, with the Association of American Medical Colleges, said Harper’s experience is not an outlier.

In February, proposed cuts threatened nearly $120 million of Nevada universities’ NIH research federal funding — dollars that helped studies on everything from esophageal cancer to Alzheimer’s. 

Lawsuits prevented the immediate termination of grants, and UNR and UNLV have noted that funding has not been affected as of the start of the fall semester. Pierce said delays and other types of disruptions can have an outsized effect.

“Science doesn't happen in small time frames, and you can’t turn it on and off like a spigot or light switch and just pick up where you were before,” Pierce said. 

The United States can’t afford to lose the expertise of researchers who have been working in labs on specific issues for decades, she said, adding that Harper’s experience shows how delays in funding can pull younger generations of undergraduates and graduate students out of a certain field or out of research altogether. 

There’s still hope.

Andrew Bender, an assistant staff member in neuroimaging research with the Ruvo Center, said philanthropy from the center allowed him to launch into research focused on understanding why some people don’t succumb to the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. The goal is to translate that into developing a treatment that can make people more resistant and resilient to the disease. 

As federal changes have led to questions about cuts to programs such as the NIH, Bender said there are fears that it disincentivizes the hiring of researchers, which makes support from outside foundations critical. 

“We aren’t bound by history in the same way that a lot of institutions that have been around for decades are,” Bender said. “We have opportunities to think critically about what are the needs of our community, of our clinicians, patients and their families, and create something that will truly serve that, and I think in doing that, that will really foster more federal grant dollars coming into the state, if we follow that vision.”