A DNA microscope. A gene therapy for “bubble boy” disease. The restoration of cellular activity in pig brains four hours after death. Nano-robots that might clean teeth better than flossing.
These are just some of the 64 important discoveries and inventions included in this year’s STAT Madness, a bracket-style competition to honor the best biomedical research published in 2019.
The contest is modeled on college basketball’s March Madness, but rather than head-to-head competition for athletic glory, STAT Madness pits 64 U.S. universities, medical schools, and other institutions against each other in a hard-fought battle for scientific renown.
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The winner of each matchup will be decided by popular vote. The first of six rounds of voting in the single-elimination contest begins Monday, March 2. The bracket will go live at 12:01 a.m. Sign up below to be notified by email when voting begins.
Each entry consists of a summary of the research and a link to an abstract or the full paper.
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STAT Madness is a competition, but one with a not-so-hidden ulterior motive: Scanning through the entries should give readers an appreciation of the ingenuity and breadth of biomedical research being pursued around the U.S.
The popular vote champion, as well as an editors’ pick, will be announced April 6.
The contestants were culled from 128 entrants, based on the scientific rigor of their research, the originality and novelty of the work, and its potential beneficial impact in its respective field or for patients and society. They come from 18 states and Washington, D.C., spread across every time zone and region: New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, the Mountain states, and the West Coast.
Here are the teams selected for STAT Madness 2020. (There are fewer than 64 entries listed because some institutions have multiple entries.)
American Cancer Society
Baylor College of Medicine
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Boundless Bio
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Children’s National Hospital
Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute
Emory University School of Medicine
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Georgia State University
Gladstone Institutes
Institute for NanoBioTechnology at Johns Hopkins University
Institute for Protein Design (University of Washington)
Institute for Systems Biology
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT
McGovern Institute for Brain Research (MIT)
NYU College of Dentistry
NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing
Penn Medicine
Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT
Rockefeller University
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Stony Brook University
Texas A&M College of Medicine
Texas Heart Institute
UC Berkeley
UC Irvine School of Medicine
UCLA
UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center
UC San Diego School of Medicine
UC San Francisco
University of Iowa Health Care
University of Massachusetts Medical School
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
University of Michigan
University of Michigan College of Engineering
University of Michigan Depression Center
University of Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
University of Utah Health
University of Virginia School of Medicine
University of Washington
Weill Cornell Medicine
Whitehead Institute (MIT)
Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University
Yale University
Go UPENN!
This year you have included four different groups in Seattle. I’m not aware of the contest ever having a group from Seattle in prior years. Can you confirm, and possibly, explain if you are attempting to have wider geographic representation?