LEGO football stadium sells seats to fund life-saving research

A heart surgery researcher is selling seats in a football stadium to raise money for life-saving studies – but the stadium is made from LEGO bricks.

Working at Ohio State University in the United States, Dr Paul Janssen has two passionate interests: heart surgery and LEGO. He has combined his love of both by building a brick-built replica of Ohio State football stadium and selling seats in the LEGO stadium to raise money for his research, reports ESPN.

The stadium can seat thousands of minifigures, so the university’s marketing team initially thought of selling seats in it for $25 a go. If you bought a ‘ticket’, you would get a minifigure dedicated to you to sit in the LEGO stadium.

$25 a seat would have already generated a lot of money for Dr Janssen’s research, but one donor took it one step further, donating a whopping $50,000 for four seats. The father of two had received a heart transplant from Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center and was keen to give back to the team who made it possible.

So far, the novel seat-selling idea has raised $90,000 for Dr Janssen’s work. He is focused on working on how to reduce cases of heart failure by improving the strength of the organ in people who might be vulnerable to heart problems.

The brick-built stadium will be on display just down the street from the real-life arena, in the Ohio State library, until February 2023, although Dr Janseen is keen to arrange for it to go on display in more locations, so more people can see and enjoy his hard work.

Featured image: Courtesy of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center via ESPN

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