Meet the contenders for the STAT Madness 2024 crown. Voting is now open.

The 64 contestants whose discoveries and innovations have been selected for the 2024 edition of STAT Madness come from 50 institutions across the U.S. and voting is now open. The teams include a Nobel laureate (Jennifer Doudna) and biotech big shots (Robert Langer and David Liu), but also up-and-comers.

STAT Madness is our annual bracket-style competition in which readers vote on the most important and impactful biomedical and health research published in the past year by scientists at universities and independent labs. The tournament launches March 1, and after six rounds of voting, the winner will be announced April 5.

The entries reflect the broad range of scientific inquiry. They include the comprehensive mapping of the mouse brain, the first time this has been done with a mammal, and large-scale genomics investigations that found genes conserved across 240 mammalian species and new antibiotic candidates in the genomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

They include clinical trials of new cancer therapies, advances in developing treatments for fragile X syndrome, the leading inherited cause of intellectual disabilities, new approaches to delivering gene therapies to hard-to-reach organs, and growing a mini-ovary in a dish.

Bioengineers’ prototypes of new medical gadgets are also featured — among them ingestible devices to combat obesity and eating disorders and 3D printing inside the body — as is research that revealed hospitals widely share potentially sensitive website visitor data with big tech companies, and that linked contaminated meat to patients hospitalized with urinary tract infections.

Cancer research accounts for 15 of the entries, and nine focus on infectious diseases, but only three involve Covid-19 — a sign of the U.S. research enterprise’s return to its pre-pandemic priorities. In comparison, STAT Madness 2021 had 15 Covid-related entries.

STAT Madness is based on college basketball’s March Madness tournaments, but the goal is larger than simply crowning a champion. By scanning through the entries, readers will gain an appreciation for the scope and ingenuity of biomedical research being pursued around the U.S.

Last year’s popular vote winner was the NYU College of Dentistry, for developing a gel to treat gum disease.

Follow this year’s competition on your favorite social media platforms using the hashtag #STATMadness.

Here are the teams selected for STAT Madness 2024. (There are fewer than 64 teams because some institutions have more than one entry, and some are combined entries.)

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Allen Institute

Baylor College of Medicine

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Duke University

BWH / West Virginia University

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

CHOP / NICHD

Frankel Cardiovascular Center – University of Michigan

Gladstone Institutes

Indiana University

Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation – University of Michigan

Institute for Systems Biology

Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Group / UC San Diego

Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT / UMass Chan Medical School

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

MSKCC / Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

New York University

NYU Tandon School of Engineering / MIT

Michigan Medicine – University of Michigan

Northeastern University

Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Rogel Cancer Center – University of Michigan

Salk Institute

Stanford University

The George Washington University

GW / Northwestern University

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

UMass Chan Medical School

University Hospitals / Case Western Reserve University

University of California, Irvine

University of California, Santa Cruz

University of Chicago Medicine

University of Iowa

University of Pennsylvania

University of Pittsburgh / Carnegie Mellon University

University of Rochester Medical Center

University of Utah Health

UVA Health

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Weill Cornell Medicine

Whitehead Institute

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University