A top biomedical scientist has left the United States for China after giving up millions of dollars in research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

After studying and working in the US for 22 years, Hu “Tony” Ye, who held the prestigious chair professor position at Tulane University in New Orleans, left to take on the role of founding dean at the new school of biomedical engineering at his alma mater, Tsinghua University.

Hu has long focused on the rapid detection of viruses, publishing numerous papers in top-tier journals and serving as the associate editor of ACS Nano journal.

Hu has applied for more than 30 patents in the field of nanomedicine, 14 of which have been authorised by American or international companies, and is a co-founder of four biotech start-up companies in the United States.

Just months before he left the US, he commented publicly on freezes and cuts to NIH funding.

He said a US$3.7 million NIH grant affected by the cuts had been allocated for the early detection of tuberculosis and HIV in children.

Additionally, US$3.1 million of NIH funding had been designated to develop blood-based cancer detection technologies and US$1.5 million was allocated to procure state-of-the-art equipment to further disease detection, cancer research and medical technology development.

On April 7, Hu published an open letter on the Tulane University website, titled “Preserving life-saving research: the crucial impact of NIH funding on public health”, writing that cuts to NIH funding would have a widespread impact on scientific research.

“Now is the time to raise our voices, to protect our research and our future. If we miss this moment, we may never get another chance – no one will be spared,” Hu wrote in the letter which he also posted to his LinkedIn profile and commented on.

“Proposed federal budget cuts could slash indirect cost reimbursements for NIH grants from 53 per cent to 15 per cent.”

On October 10, according to publicly available information from Tsinghua University, Hu returned to China as founding dean of the newly established school of biomedical engineering. He was also appointed the Zhao-Yi endowed professor at Tsinghua.

The South China Morning Post reached out to Hu for comment earlier this week, and he clarified the open letter during an interview on Friday.

“NIH has maintained full support for my research group in the United States without any funding cuts,” Hu said.

“I joined Tsinghua University full-time not because of the reduction in NIH funding.

“All of my NIH funding - several million dollars - left in the US has now been transferred to other Tulane University professors to continue the project, without any interference from NIH. I also informed my project manager about my return to China, and they all understood.”

Hu graduated in 1999 from the college of chemistry and chemical engineering at Lanzhou University in Gansu province, majoring in organic chemistry.

He quickly stood out at Lanzhou, as one of just 10 students graduating with honours out of 2,000, before pursuing a master’s degree in the department of chemistry at Tsinghua University.

After graduating in 2003, he studied biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he obtained a master’s degree in 2005 and a doctorate in 2009.

From 2009 to 2011, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Texas Health Science Centre in Houston.

During academic lectures, Hu often mentioned the period following his doctoral studies when he met a group of children in Italy who had developed Aids. He said their suffering motivated him to develop technologies to quickly detect infections related to Aids and tuberculosis.

According to estimates by the World Health Organization in 2024, around 10.8 million people worldwide contract tuberculosis each year. Around 1.25 million die from the disease, many of whom succumb because of undiagnosed conditions or late diagnoses that render them incurable.

Additionally, one-third of the global population is infected with the tuberculosis bacillus but does not develop the disease. Researching new diagnostic methods and improving existing ones has become an urgent priority.

Hu developed a new method that enriches tuberculosis peptide antigens in human blood using nanoparticles, which are then detected with a mass spectrometer. Compared to commonly used diagnostic methods that require four to six weeks, the new method can shorten the diagnostic time to 2½ hours, with laboratory costs of around US$3 per test.

From 2011 to 2015, Hu was an assistant professor in the nanomedicine department at Houston Methodist Research Institute, while concurrently holding the position of assistant professor in the department of cell biology at Weill Cornell Medical College. In November 2015, he was promoted to associate professor.

In July 2019, he joined Tulane University medical school as the Weatherhead chair professor.

Celia S. Weatherhead, a Tulane alumna and a major donor to the university, established the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Diagnostics where Hu was the second director.

In January 2021, his laboratory at Tulane University developed a rapid Covid-19 testing kit. This kit, which used saliva as the sample source instead of nasal swabs and could detect the Covid-19 virus and its variants, was more sensitive than nasopharyngeal swabs and could provide results in 15 minutes using a smartphone.

In January 2024, the journal Nature published an article titled “Tracking down tuberculosis”, which mentioned seven potential new tuberculosis screening technologies, three of which were developed by Hu’s lab.

According to the Tsinghua University website, before Hu’s return to China, his laboratory received long-term funding from institutions such as the US Department of Defence, NIH, the Gates Foundation and WHO.

In June, the Association of Diagnostics and Laboratory Medicine in the US awarded Hu its 2025 academy award for outstanding contributions to clinical chemistry in a selected area of research. The award recognises clinical chemists whose pioneering research efforts have placed them among the world’s foremost experts in their fields.

However, Hu stated in an open letter in April that, “without proper funding, those solutions may never reach the people who need them most”.