The Trump administration on Wednesday announced major new restrictions in funding of research involving human fetal tissue — a product that many scientists say is irreplaceable in studying certain diseases — in a move that immediately ended a decades-long partnership with UCSF involving HIV research.

The National Institutes of Health, the country’s largest single provider of medical research funding, will no longer support new research by its in-house scientists that uses human fetal tissue obtained from abortions. Scientists with NIH grants who do not work for the agency will be allowed to continue applying for funding, but their applications will be subject to approval from a newly created review board.

The announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services had been anticipated for a few months. It is likely to end most if not all federally funded research involving human fetal tissue over the next few years. The move was widely perceived as a political gesture toward President Trump’s base of conservative, largely antiabortion voters.

“UCSF strongly opposes today’s abrupt decision,” said UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood in a statement. “The efforts by the administration to impede this work will undermine scientific discovery and the ability to find effective treatments for serious and life-threatening disease.”

The NIH currently provides funding to about 200 projects involving human fetal tissue, according to the health and human services agency. Scientists heading those projects will not be immediately affected by the restrictions, though they will have to go through a new approval process if they want to renew funding when their current grants end.

UCSF was the only academic institution cited in the announcement, which stated that a contract between the university and the Department of Health and Human Services that was up for renewal on Wednesday would not get further funding. The contract came under scrutiny last December, after HHS ended a separate contract with the company supplying the fetal tissue used for the UCSF research.

Though the lead scientist was affiliated with UCSF, not the NIH, the work was designed to directly support NIH scientists and so it fell under the new rule to no longer fund in-house research involving human fetal tissue, according to the Health and Human Services Department.

The current contract was part of a 30-year working relationship between NIH and UCSF on this particular HIV research, Hawgood said in his statement; the lead scientist at UCSF did not reply to requests for comment. The contract initially had been set to run through 2020, for a total of $13 million, but that end date was shortened when the HHS opened its review in December. UCSF ended up receiving about $10 million of the promised funding.

The work involved transplanting human fetal tissue, which had been acquired from Advanced Bioscience Resources in Alameda, into mice to study how human cells react to chemical compounds that could be used to treat and potentially cure HIV.

So-called humanized mice have been used over several decades to study a variety of diseases and genetic conditions and to test potential drug therapies. Fetal tissue is considered especially useful because it allows scientists to study how diseases progress over time. It has also been used to study human development from the earliest stages of life.

The UCSF contract came under review after HHS ended a contract between Advanced Bioscience and the Food and Drug Administration to provide fetal tissue for scientific research. Both Hawgood and officials with the health and human services agency said the decision to end the UCSF contract was not due to any violations or unethical behavior by the university.

“Today’s action ends a 30-year partnership with the NIH to use specially designed models that could be developed only through the use of fetal tissue to find a cure for HIV,” Hawgood said. “UCSF exercised appropriate oversight and complied with all state and federal laws. We believe this decision to be politically motivated, shortsighted and not based on sound science.”

The new federal guideline was greeted by immediate cheers from antiabortion activists who said it was “outrageous” that the government had been funneling tens of millions of taxpayer dollars toward research involving material obtained from abortions.

“President Trump knows that this great nation is worthy of a life-affirming science policy,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion political organization.

Under the guidelines for funding ongoing and future research involving human fetal tissue, scientists will go through an expanded application process involving review from a newly created “ethics advisory board” made up of scientists, attorneys, ethicists, doctors and at least one theologian.

Critics of the new policy said they expected few if any projects to pass the review process, which would effectively end all research involving human fetal tissue. “I think the chance of that committee approving fetal tissue for anything is next to zero,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University School of Medicine.

“This acknowledges the power of the conservative religious bloc,” Caplan said. “This administration is not going to waver on the topic. It’s something that matters to its constituency a great deal.”

The Department of Health and Human Services previously had announced plans to put $20 million toward finding alternatives to fetal tissue for research. But several scientists said there are no replacements for some areas of study. “We would all like to use alternatives to fetal tissue, no question about it,” said Warner Greene, director of the Center for HIV Cure Research at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco.

Greene said the restrictions put an immediate end to research being done at Gladstone, in conjunction with an NIH lab in Montana, that was similar to the UCSF work with humanized mice. The Gladstone group was studying how HIV forms long-standing reservoirs that make it difficult to cure.

“That study is now dead,” Greene said. “It’s a dark day in science, where a very valuable experimental system has been terminated for obviously political reasons.”

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com