Welcome to the 2025 edition of STAT Madness, our bracket-style competition in which you, the readers, choose the most impressive biomedical and health research published last year. Voting begins today.
Modeled on college basketball’s March Madness tournament, STAT Madness is meant to be fun, but it also has a serious purpose: highlighting important scientific advances emerging from labs at the nation’s universities, medical schools, and other U.S. research institutions and companies.
Reinforcing that point is the predominance of cancer research among this year’s entries, accounting for 25 of the 64 discoveries selected for the bracket based on their scientific rigor, originality, and potential impact. They include clinical trials of CAR-T cell therapies for brain and prostate cancers, a new colorectal cancer blood test, and a new approach to treating breast cancer that eliminates the wait for reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy.
Researchers also developed cancer vaccines, characterized a new lung cancer subtype that’s more common in younger people who never smoked, and discovered an inherited genetic mutation that makes breast cancer more likely to spread.
Neuroscience advances represent eight entries, including a non-invasive electrical stimulator that restores some sensation and function to hands and arms of people paralyzed by spinal cord injuries, a new gene therapy for prion diseases, and research elucidating how psychedelics work in the brain.
Also featured are a wireless light-powered pacemaker; a “window” implanted in the abdomen of pregnant mice to enable researchers to study the placenta and causes of pregnancy complications; and research pointing to a possible reason that Hispanic patients with respiratory failure are more likely to die: They are five times as likely to be deeply sedated when put on a ventilator than white patients.
Over five weeks, there will be six rounds of voting before the winner is announced on April 7.
Last year, the popular vote winner was a team from Baylor College of Medicine that developed a “smoke alarm” for detecting viral disease outbreaks through analyzing wastewater. The “STAT Madness All-Star” award, chosen by attendees at STAT’s Breakthrough Summit East, went to a Weill Cornell Medicine team for their work on a potential on-demand birth control pill for men.
Here are the 52 teams selected for STAT Madness 2025. (There are fewer than 64 teams because some institutions have more than one entry.)
Baylor College of Medicine
Boston Medical Center
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard / Whitehead Institute
C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
City of Hope
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Dana-Farber / Emory University
Duke University
Duke / VA
Eisenberg Family Depression Center
Florida International University
Frankel Cardiovascular Center
Fred Hutch Cancer Center
Guardant Health
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
McGovern Institute
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Michigan Medicine
Northeastern University
NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing
NYU School of Global Public Health
Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
Rogel Cancer Center
Salk Institute
The Rockefeller University
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
UC Davis
UMass Chan Medical School
University of California, Irvine
University of Chicago
University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation
University of North Carolina School of Medicine
University of Notre Dame
University of Rochester
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry
University of Utah
University of Utah Health
University of Virginia
UVA Health
UVA Health Children’s
UW Medicine
WashU Medicine
Whitehead Institute
Wyss Institute at Harvard University