Illustration by Rob Hadley for Cure
Overview
How the Cure Innovation Index evaluates the science, infrastructure, and funding behind biomedical discovery.
An institution's ability to foster biomedical innovation begins with its research capabilities. Before anything can be translated or commercialized, there has to be science worth building on, people capable of producing it, and infrastructure to support them.
The Cure Innovation Index evaluates research capabilities by looking at three things: the quality of an institution's facilities and equipment, the strength of its funding base, and the caliber of its science.
Facilities come first because they set the ceiling on what research is possible. The Index tracks how many of 26 core biomedical research facilities and labs an institution has access to, from functional genomics cores to nanofabrication centers to 3D bioprinting labs. These are highly specialized environments with experienced staff and the latest instrumentation, and their presence or absence shapes what kind of work a campus can take on.
Funding determines how much of that capacity gets used. The Index looks at an institution's average R&D spending over three years across relevant biomedical fields, as well as research spending per researcher, which adjusts for the size of the operation. A large institution with a large budget and a small institution with a focused one may both be putting resources to work effectively, and per-researcher spending helps distinguish genuine investment from sheer scale.
The hardest area to measure is the quality of the science itself. The Index approaches this from several angles: how often an institution's publications are cited relative to their field, how frequently its research feeds into clinical trials, and whether those trials skew toward early-phase drug and device studies, which tend to reflect more original work. It also considers markers of individual distinction, including HHMI investigator designations, membership in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, NIH high-risk high-reward grants, and major independent awards such as the Nobel, Lasker, MacArthur, and Vilcek prizes.
"Research capabilities are the foundation of biomedical innovation at an institution," said Erik Lium, PhD, President and Chief Commercial Innovation Officer, Mount Sinai Health System. "Without that, you're lacking the raw material to be entrepreneurial. You've got to have the discoveries and the intellectual property."
Irene Abrams, Senior Vice President of Research Innovation at Boston Children's Hospital, argued that research capabilities may be the most important of the three domains the Index measures. "Everything we do starts with the creativity of the faculty, with their research discoveries," she said.
Abrams also pointed out the importance of accounting for institutional size. Some smaller research centers have strong faculty and impressive programs yet come with smaller budgets and fewer resources than larger centers. Their impact on a scientific field or a community can still be substantial, which is why the Index normalizes for scale rather than simply rewarding size.
That impact extends to talent. When graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career scientists choose where to train or join a faculty, available research capabilities often weigh heavily in the decision. "In many cases, they're going to choose what institutions to get their training at, or where they become a faculty member, based on whether an institution has certain high-level research capabilities," Lium said. "They also look for supportive environments with opportunities to grow and develop a career."
With those measures in mind, here are the 20 institutions that scored highest in research capabilities.
Top Universities
University of Pennsylvania
University of California, San Francisco
Rockefeller University
Stanford University
Washington University in St. Louis
Harvard University
Emory University
University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
Johns Hopkins University
Duke University
Top Institutes & Centers
Mass General Brigham
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
Scripps Research Institute
Mayo Clinic
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
City of Hope National Medical Center
Fox Chase Cancer Center
