The NYU team’s work on respiratory failure was the in-person-event winner at the STAT Breakthrough Summit East event in New York.
Source: STAT News
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.