While basketball fans checked anxiously March Madness scores on Thursday, scientists met in Manhattan on the Stat Breakthrough Summit East to enter their own big dance: the Stat Madness Pitch session.
“You can think a bit such as the version of the science of ‘Shark Tank’,” said Stat Editorial Events programmer Katherine MacPhail when she started the session.
Four of the 64 teams in the annual competition of Bracket-like competition of Stat to celebrate the scientific discovery threw their research into a panel from jury members and the Summit audience. The jury panel included representatives of the sponsors of Stat Madness, Cure CEO Seema Kumar and Jobsohio Managing Director of Healthcare Tyler Allchin, as well as Stat Reporter and editorial director of Events Matthew REERPER AND Weill Cornell Medicine Pharmacology Professor Lonny. Levin’s team won the Stat Madness All-Star Award for their male contraception innovation last year.
This year’s Stat Madness competition is still open to voting, although only one team of the four on the live pitch panel is still eligible to win everything: the New York University School of Global Public Health team, currently ready to reach the Elite Eight. The NYU team also took the public pick to the live event event for their research why Spanish people are twice as likely to die from respiratory failure compared to other patients with respiratory failure.
“Our team thought we might have to do something about it, and we had an idea. We thought that Spanish patients may rather get a low value on the ICU: deep sedation,” said Mari Armstrong-Hoth, a associate professor at the NY-School for Worldwide Public Health. Although light sedation can help patients who have mechanical fans, deep sedation is associated with a series of harmful results.
The Armstrong-Hought team, including researchers from the University of Michigan, looked at patients who participated in the control arm of a randomized clinical study that took place in 48 hospitals in the US and controlled for patient’s disease and effects at hospital level. The team discovered that Spanish patients were five times more likely to be deep than other patients, which is the first plausible mechanism that explains the higher death rate for patients with Spanish respiratory failure.
The best news is, this is usable, said Armstrong-Hoth. “The only thing we have to do to resolve this is de-implement a practice that we have recognized for almost 20 years to be of low value,” she said. “For me this makes this a really optimistic finding, because it does not often find out that you might save lives through not do something. “
Other teams presented at the live event, were Justin Jee, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who represented a team that used the processing of natural language to extract data on the demography of cancer patients and results from the electronic medical and radiology reports. By combining that with the genetic data of the tumors of the patients’ tumors, the researchers were able to see associations between tumblies better and predict the patient results, so that new hypotheses for clinical examinations based on those insights appear.
Wenbin Mei, a graduate Fellow at Rockefeller University, also presented the research of his team into how cancer spreads through the body. The team discovered that patients with the PCSK9 gene were more likely to have breast cancer metastasis, which means that the spread of cancer could be hereditary. In mouse studies they were able to brake the spread, which indicates a promising road for a potential new breast cancer therapy.
Kim Mudd, a nurse manager of the pediatric allergy division at Johns Hopkins, presented her team’s research into an antibody that prevents allergic reactions. Omalizumab is an antibody treatment that has already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of allergic asthma and has shown prospective food allergy tests. The Johns Hopkins team treated both children and adults who were allergic to different foods with the antibody for 16 weeks and then tested their tolerance on their allergens.
The majority of people who responded to one third of a peanut before the study could tolerate four and a half peanuts after the treatment. Two -thirds of the participants who responded to less than a teaspoon of milk was able to tolerate half a cup of milk after the treatment, and participants who were allergic to tree notes (in addition to cashew nuts) showed similar results.
The judges wondered if people who follow the treatment would hold on to take it all their lives. Mudd explained that the antibody was a treatment, not a remedy – its likely use will be for people who are in a transitional period and are not equipped to recognize accidental exposures. A “toddler who hands over everything you are eating-that is a toddler who must be on Omalizumab,” she said, and the same for students from the university age who might be alone for the first time.
Although Stat Madness has no price in addition to bragging, the recent retreat of the federal government on financing science makes the visibility of scientific research more important than ever, speakers said during the day at the Stat Breakthrough Summit.
“Instead of thinking about science such as these Bunsen burners and these cups in a mysterious laboratory in an ivory tower,” said Melissa Dupont, worldwide public affairs lead for neurology in Sanofi, “make the word” science “more connected to daily life and every person I think it’s really important now.”
Voting for Stat Madness is now open.