As basketball fans anxiously checked March Madness scores on Thursday, scientists met in Manhattan at the STAT Breakthrough Summit East to enter a Big Dance of their own: the STAT Madness pitch session.
“You can kind of think of it like science’s version of ‘Shark Tank,’” said STAT editorial events programmer Katherine MacPhail as she kicked off the session.
Four of the 64 teams in STAT’s annual bracket-style competition celebrating scientific discovery pitched their research to a panel of judges and the summit audience. The judging panel included representatives from STAT Madness’ sponsors, Cure CEO Seema Kumar and JobsOhio managing director of healthcare Tyler Allchin, as well as STAT reporter and editorial director of events Matthew Herper and Weill Cornell Medicine pharmacology professor Lonny Levin. Levin’s team won last year’s STAT Madness All-Star award for their male birth control innovation.
This year’s STAT Madness competition is still open for voting, though only one team from the four at the live pitch panel is still eligible to win it all: the New York University School of Global Public Health team, currently poised to make it to the Elite Eight. The NYU team also took home the audience pick at the live event for their research on why Hispanic people are twice as likely to die from respiratory failure compared to other respiratory failure patients.
“Our team thought that maybe we should do something about that, and we had an idea. We thought that Hispanic patients might be more likely to receive a low-value practice in the ICU: deep sedation,” said Mari Armstrong-Hough, an associate professor at NYU’s School of Global Public Health. While light sedation can help patients who are on mechanical ventilators, deep sedation is associated with a range of harmful outcomes.
Armstrong-Hough’s team, which included researchers from the University of Michigan, looked at patients enrolled in the control arm of a randomized clinical trial that took place in 48 hospitals across the U.S. and controlled for patient demographics, severity of illness, and hospital-level effects. The team found that Hispanic patients were five times more likely to be deep-sedated than other patients, which is the first plausible mechanism that explains the higher death rate for Hispanic respiratory failure patients.
The best news is, this is actionable, said Armstrong-Hough. “All we have to do to fix this is de-implement a practice that we have recognized for nearly 20 years to be of low value,” she said. “To me, that makes this a really optimistic finding, because it’s not often that you find out that you might be able to save lives by not doing something.”
Other teams that presented at the live event included Justin Jee, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, representing a team that used natural language processing to extract data on cancer patients’ demographics and outcomes from the electronic medical record and radiology reports that otherwise would have had to be extracted manually. Combining that with the genetic data from sequencing the patients’ tumors, the researchers were able to better see associations between tumor genes and predict patient outcomes, surfacing new hypotheses for clinical trials based on those insights.
Wenbin Mei, a graduate fellow at Rockefeller University, also presented his team’s research on how cancer spreads through the body. The team found that patients with the PCSK9 gene were more likely to have breast cancer metastasis, meaning that the spread of cancer might be hereditary. In mice studies, they were able to inhibit the spread, indicating a promising avenue for a potential new breast cancer therapy.
Kim Mudd, a nurse manager from the pediatric allergy division at Johns Hopkins, presented her team’s research on an antibody that prevents allergic reactions. Omalizumab is an antibody treatment that has already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating allergic asthma and has shown promise in food allergy trials. The Johns Hopkins team treated both children and adults who were allergic to various foods with the antibody for 16 weeks and then tested their tolerance to their allergens.
The majority of people who reacted to one-third of a peanut before the study were able to tolerate four and a half peanuts after the treatment. Two-thirds of the participants who reacted to less than a teaspoon of milk were able to tolerate half a cup of milk after treatment, and participants who were allergic to tree nuts (besides cashews) showed similar results.
The judges questioned whether people taking the treatment would be stuck taking it for their whole lives. Mudd explained that the antibody was a treatment, not a cure — its likely uses will be for people who are in a transitional period and aren’t equipped to recognize accidental exposures. A “toddler that’s going to eat anything you hand to them — that’s a toddler that needs to be on omalizumab,” she said, and the same for college-age students who might be on their own for the first time.
Though STAT Madness doesn’t have a prize besides bragging rights, the federal government’s recent retreat on funding science makes the visibility of scientific research more important than ever, speakers said throughout the day at the STAT Breakthrough Summit.
“Instead of thinking about science as these Bunsen burners and these beakers in some mysterious lab in an ivory tower,” said Melissa Dupont, global public affairs lead for neurology at Sanofi, “making the word ‘science’ more connected to everyday life and every person I think is really important right now.”
Voting for STAT Madness is open now.