From ALS to dental floss: Here are the teams competing in STAT Madness 2026

STAT News · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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A genetic test to diagnose ALS — and predict survival times. A new mechanism that explains how the sleeping brain flushes the waste proteins and toxins that contribute to Alzheimer’s. Dental floss that can track your cortisol levels while you tackle your teeth. These are some of the innovations featured in STAT Madness, our annual bracket-style competition in which readers vote on the most important and impactful biomedical and health research published in the past year. The tournament features 64 entries from 50 universities, institutes, and independent labs across the United States. Voting opens on March 2 and will continue for six rounds throughout the month. The winner will be announced on April 7. (See the full bracket here.) This year’s contestants represent an ambitious range of scientific discovery, though a few trends stand out. More than a quarter focus on cancer causes, mechanisms, and treatments. Researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, for example, analyzed data from more than 1,000 patients to show a link between receiving a Covid mRNA vaccine and cancer survival. A team from the University of Illinois Chicago developed a new theory for why many cancer patients suffer from cachexia, or muscle loss, along with a new avenue for treatment. Scientists at the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center developed a CAR-T platform that can remove and replace the antigen-recognizing portion of CAR-T in vivo, which could better protect a patient’s immune system. Gene editing was another focus in this year’s submissions. Entrants include a team from the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania and Penn Medicine, who for the first time delivered a custom therapy to edit the abnormal genome of a severely ill infant, baby KJ, designed and implemented in just eight months. Several entries utilized artificial intelligence to perform their analyses, building new tools and techniques in the process. Researchers at the Whitehead Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, developed an AI model to predict a protein’s destination within human cells based on its amino acid sequence, a finding that could help untangle the role of mis-localization in disease. A team from the Duke School of Medicine created an AI model to predict which children are at greatest risk for developing serious mental illnesses. Some previously hot topics had fewer entries. Just a handful of teams focused on infectious diseases like Covid-19, reflecting shifting research and funding priorities under the Trump administration. Last year’s popular vote winner was a team of researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, who found that star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes are involved in forming and recalling memories. (Baylor also won 2024’s popular vote contest.) Follow this year’s competition on your favorite social media platforms using the hashtag #STATMadness. Here are the teams selected for STAT Madness 2026. (Some institutions have more than one entry, and some are combined entries, so there are fewer than 64.) Baylor College of Medicine Boston Children’s Hospital Boston Medical Center Brigham and Women’s Hospital Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Mass General Brigham Brown University Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Columbia University Duke University Duke University School of Medicine Eisenberg Family Depression Center Florida International University Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Gladstone Institutes Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Institute for Systems Biology Massachusetts Institute of Technology Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Michigan Medicine NYU College of Dentistry NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing Rice University RUSH University Scripps Research Stevens Institute of Technology The Rockefeller University The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Tufts University UCLA UMass Chan Medical School University of California, Irvine University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center University of Illinois Chicago University of Iowa University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital University of Michigan Caswell Diabetes Institute University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center University of Minnesota University of Notre Dame University of Pennsylvania University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine University of Rochester University of Utah Health University of Virginia UVA Health Virginia Commonwealth University Weill Cornell Medicine Whitehead Institute