Medical research changed this UC student’s life
April 15, 2025 •
Ryan Manriquez, right, with UC Davis Chancellor Gary May. (Photo: Ryan Manriquez)
As the main federal agency for biomedical research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a drug discovery powerhouse: Of 356 new medicines that got FDA approval between 2010 and 2019, 354 or them — or 99.4% — were developed using NIH dollars.
The agency has funded dozens of studies into spinal muscular atrophy, or SMA, which UC Berkeley graduate student Ryan Manriquez has lived with since childhood. Advances came from industry labs and from NIH headquarters in Maryland. But most emerged from a network of academic researchers at universities across the country and around the world, including the University of Utah, Ohio State, Indiana State, Harvard and UC Irvine.
When Ryan learned in February that the federal government planned to cut billions of dollars of NIH funding to universities, he knew he needed to speak up. He wrote an op-ed that was recently published in the Hill, and shared the impact of the cuts on UC graduate education, and on the SMA patient community, during remarks at the March UC Regents meeting.
“What I want my representatives to know is that funding medical research is about more than just numbers. It’s real people,” he says.
Read Ryan’s story
Tags: health research, research, Ryan Manriquez, UC Graduate and Professional Council
