Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

Last month, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard University unveiled VirScan, a diagnostic blood test that reveals more than 1000 different strains of viruses that are currently or which have previously afflicted individual patients. Given that VirScan costs about the same as traditional ELISA assays which only detect a limited number of pathogens one-at-a-time, this is a tremendous leap forward toward personalized medicine. Data gleaned from snapshots of patients’ past viral infections can give doctors clues about patients’ present health, and — perhaps — glimpses into the future.

My last post talked about off-label use of drugs, which is one way that patients can get access to drugs that are not officially approved for their condition. There’s another way this can happen, and it’s called compassionate use.

“Location, location, location” is the realtor’s mantra, and now, besides great schools, walkable streets and friendly neighbors, real estate agents may include “longevity” among the features trumpeted in their listings.

The short answer to our provocative headline is no. But two other recent headlines got us pondering the question. Yesterday, the New York Times, and on Monday, the Journal of the American Medical Association(JAMA) published, respectively,  a story and an opinion piece on the potential downsides to medicine that is aimed at specific genetic profiles.

[A disclaimer: you probably won’t want to read this post while having lunch at your desk.]

The last two Map of Biomedicine blog posts have introduced us to the clinical trial process. Clinical trials are the gold standard for determining whether a drug works, and are extremely important to make sure that drugs are only used in situations when they are known to help.

Yesterday evening, the Wall Street Journalreported on its website that researchers at the Texas A&M Health Science Center are closing in on faster, more accurate diagnostics for tuberculosis. The infectious disease usually attacks the lungs, but it can spread to other parts of the body -- extrapulmonary tuberculosis in those cases -- through the air from person to person. Although it is relatively rare in the U.S. it is not unheard of; tuberculosis (TB) made headlines when a woman with extensively drug resistant TB (XDR TB) was admitted to NIH.

Although researchers can’t quite toss out their microscopes, two new studies reported in the New England Journal of Medicine show that variations in brain tumors’ genomics can be used to determine the best course of treatment for patients with certain kinds of tumors. For the most part, doctors have analyzed tissue samples to categorize and predict tumors’ potential trajectories. The papers’ authors show that genome scans of patients’ tumors remove several degrees of subjective analysis leading to more accurate diagnostics and earlier, better treatments.

We suspected this all along: people want to be engaged with their own healthcare. Our suspicions were confirmed by researchers in the U.S. in a study published in the European Journal of Human Genetics, as well as by researchers in the U.K. via survey results presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Genetics.

Fast Company has reported the Rochester, Minnesota is on track to embark on a 20-year, $6.5 billion makeover. The impetus for the major renovation is to transform the small city best known as the home of the Mayo Clinic into a major player in the global medical tourism industry.