For people who may not follow college basketball but want to share in the March tradition of cheering for a team as it tears through a tournament bracket, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has come through for you. STAT, an online publication focused on medicine, health and scientific discovery, has included two WashU Medicine projects in their annual STAT Madness competition, an elimination-style tournament to select the top biomedical innovation or discovery of the previous year.
Aspiring biomedical bracketologists can see – and vote – for all entrants on the STAT Madness website. The winner of each round is determined by popular vote, and fans can vote once per day. First round voting closes at 4 a.m. ET Monday, March 10, and is open to everyone to participate and vote daily.
The WashU Medicine research team led by neurology professor Nico U. F. Dosenbach, MD, PhD, and Ginger E. Nicol, MD, an associate professor of psychiatry, was selected for its discovery that the psychedelic compound psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, disrupts a specific region of the brain called the default mode network. The team used intensive MRI scanning on volunteer subjects to measure brain activity before, during and weeks after a controlled administration of psilocybin. The default network – a connected series of brain regions that synchronize their activity when the mind is not focused on another task – was significantly desynchronized during the acute phase of the psilocybin trip, with lingering effects for weeks afterwards.
Psilocybin is believed to have potential as a medication to combat conditions such as depression or post-traumatic distress, and this research is an important step to better understand what it is doing in the brain, and how those effects could have therapeutic value.
In the first round of the bracket, Dosenbach and his colleagues are pitted against a research team from UC Davis.
The second WashU Medicine team was chosen for a phase 1 clinical trial of a cancer vaccine conducted at Siteman Cancer Center, based at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and WashU Medicine. The study shows promising results for patients with triple-negative breast cancer who received an investigational vaccine designed to prevent recurrence of tumors.
The neoantigen DNA vaccine, developed by a team led by William E. Gillanders, MD, the Mary Culver Distinguished Professor of Surgery, used proteins produced by a patient’s own tumor to train their body’s immune system to attack cells with those proteins. The aggressive triple-negative breast cancer has no other targeted treatment and has a high risk of coming back even if removed surgically. Although the clinical trial was only designed to test the safety of the procedure, 16 of the 18 participants had no recurrence of their cancer even after three years, whereas the average for this form of cancer is 50%.
The Gillanders team is pitted against a group from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
The schedule of voting for each round is as follows:
· First round: Ends at 4 a.m. ET Monday, March 10.
· Second round: Ends at 4 a.m. ET Saturday, March 15.
· Third round: Ends at 4 a.m. ET Thursday, March 20.
· Fourth round: Ends at 4 a.m. ET Thursday, March 27.
· Semi-finals: Ends at 4 a.m. ET Wednesday, April 2.
· Finals: Ends at 9 p.m. ET. Sunday, April 6.