Overview
Data from 303 U.S. institutions tracks the full path from discovery to commercialization, revealing wide variation among the nation’s top biomedical players.
The United States invests tens of billions of dollars in biomedical research every year. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone distributes nearly $48 billion annually to universities, hospitals, and research institutes across the country. But a sweeping new analysis of the nation's leading biomedical research institutions finds that while funding is the oxygen of the enterprise, it isn't the whole story. The most prolific institutions are distinguished by the commercialization infrastructure they have built to carry discoveries from the laboratory into the hands of patients.
The Cure Innovation Index, is the first ranking of American biomedical research institutions built around that premise, evaluating not just the science they produce, but their capacity to translate it into real world impact. The findings make clear that scientific excellence and translational excellence are related but distinct, and that the institutions leading American medicine forward are not always the ones with the largest budgets or research footprints.
The index is designed to give institutions a way to benchmark their translational performance against peers, and to give investors and industry partners a clearer picture of where commercialization infrastructure is strongest.
Which Institutions Rose to the Top
The Index ranked 303 U.S. institutions across two categories—Universities being one, and Institutes and Centers the other—drawn from a pool of more than 6,000 institutions of higher learning or with biomedical research activity. Each was evaluated on three domains that together capture the full arc of translational research: entrepreneurial readiness, which measures how well an institution prepares and supports its researchers to commercialize their work; research capabilities, which assesses the scientific infrastructure and output that makes discovery possible; and market translation, which measures how effectively an institution converts that science into commercial and clinical impact. The rankings draw on more than a dozen federal and commercial databases, an original audit of all institutions, and surveys of more than 3,000 scientists, industry leaders, and biomedical experts.
See the full Methodology here.
Topping the university list are Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of California San Francisco. Among the institutes and centers—the hospitals, cancer centers, and research institutes that operate outside university governance—the top five are Mass General Brigham, Mayo Clinic, Scripps Research Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
These composite rankings reveal the creme de la creme of American biomedical innovation, but how these institutions scored on individual domains tells an even richer story, revealing meaningful differences in how even the nation's most accomplished institutions approach the translational pipeline, and where each has built its greatest strengths.
Consider MIT. By the measures of research power (laboratory infrastructure, funding levels, sheer volume of output), it ranks 31st on the list of universities. Yet when it comes to turning that science into patents, companies, and commercial impact, it ranks second in the nation, bested only by Harvard. MIT has clearly built something that money alone cannot buy, a supportive culture that enables its researchers to take their groundbreaking discoveries and turn them into cures.
Among independent institutions, Cleveland Clinic ranks sixth overall but is tied for first in entrepreneurial readiness. It has built one of the strongest formal innovation cultures in the country. Its market translation rank of 22nd suggests those investments have not yet fully registered in commercial output.
The University of Pennsylvania tells yet another story. It ranks first in research capabilities and third overall, but eighth in market translation. Penn is home to two landmarks of modern medicine, Kymriah, the first FDA-approved CAR-T cell therapy, and Luxturna, the first FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited disease, both developed in Penn laboratories. That an institution with that track record still ranks outside the top five in market translation shows how high the bar is at the top of the index.
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard presents a different profile. It ranks fourth in market translation despite ranking 38th in entrepreneurial readiness, among the lowest of any top-ten institution on that measure. Its translational track record has been built less through formal entrepreneurial programs than through deep research partnerships with industry. In 2025, the FDA approved sevabertinib, the first cancer drug based on Broad science (and contributions from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute), developed through a long-standing research alliance with Bayer. The data raises the question of whether further investment in entrepreneurial infrastructure could amplify what is already a strong commercial track record.
What the top performers across both categories share is a set of compounding advantages: technology transfer offices staffed with industry experience, training that prepares researchers to patent and partner, and decades of cultivated industry relationships. Scientific excellence alone does not close the translational gap. The distance between what an institution discovers and what reaches patients is shaped by the commercialization systems built around the science, and those systems vary enormously even among the nation's best.
A Benchmark Built for This Moment
The Index draws on data from 2021 to 2024, the three years immediately before the current upheaval in American science. Since then, the federal government has terminated more than 2,300 NIH grants totaling nearly $3.8 billion, and according to a 2026 STAT survey of nearly 1,000 federally funded scientists, more than two out of every five have canceled planned research. Abroad, China has surpassed the United States in clinical trial volume and filed 1.8 million patent applications in 2024, triple the U.S. figure. The index establishes a baseline that makes it possible to measure how these shifts reshape the translational landscape in the years ahead.
As federal support contracts and private capital become the decisive factor in what science survives, the question the Index is designed to answer grows more urgent: how can institutions make the most of what they have? The answer matters not just to the institutions themselves but to the investors, industry partners, and policymakers deciding where to place their bets on the future of American medicine.
The Opportunity in the Data
The 303 institutions in the Index are, by definition, the best in the nation at biomedical research and translation—every one of them selected from a final pool of 1,200 eligible candidates. What the data reveals is less about the winners and losers and more of a map of where the greatest opportunity lies.
This ranking gives each institution, and the investors, administrators, and policymakers who work with them, a clear roadmap and measure of where those opportunities are and how large they are. The full rankings and institutional profiles are publicly available on our site. Institutions that want to go deeper into the data and benchmark their performance against peers can subscribe to the full diagnostic platform.
MIT’s gap in research capabilities and its prolific market translation tells a compelling story about what an institution has built beyond its laboratories. Every institution in this index has a story like this and now, for the first time, the data exists to make it readable and actionable.
