Dear Dr. Bhattacharya,

<h3>You lead the largest public funder of medical research in the world. That gives you the power to decide what your grants pay for.</h3> <h3><br />Right now, some of them pay for experiments on dogs. At Ohio State University, a pacemaker drives a dog's heart to 600 beats per minute until it fails. At Johns Hopkins, dogs are put into complete circulatory arrest and their brains are studied afterward. These experiments are funded and running now, and they can be found in the NIH's own grant records.</h3> <h3><br />Your own agency has said this work no longer requires them. In 2025, NIH committed to expanding human-based science and reducing animal use, and in 2026 you launched a new office to develop and scale methods that replace animals, including human tissue models and computational tools. The science to study the heart and brain without dogs already exists. Funding it on dogs is now a choice, not a necessity.</h3> <h3><br />The dogs come from a company in New York called Marshall BioResources, the largest lab-dog breeder in the country. USDA inspection records this year put more than 15,000 dogs inside its walls, bred to order and waiting to be shipped to labs like these.</h3> <h3>No one is asking you to shut down a private breeder. You can't, and neither can we.</h3> <h3>But that breeder stays in business for one reason: the labs can afford to buy its dogs, and federal grants pay the bill.</h3> <h3>You can change that. You can stop signing the grants that fund these experiments. When the labs can no longer purchase, the breeder loses its only market, and the machine that produces these dogs stops.</h3> <h3><br />We urge you to do the one thing within your power, and cut the funding that keeps this cycle running.</h3>