Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

A message of gratitude from 5AM Solutions' CEO, Brent Gendleman.

Katie Couric did a segment on her talk show on December 4th about the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine. The promo for that show had one graphic that said ‘HPV Vaccine Controversy’ and another that said ‘Potentially Dangerous’. I’ll leave the broader critiques to others (see Matthew Herper and Seth Mnookin for two good ones). Couric’s show was a biased view of the HPV vaccine that hysterically exaggerated the vaccine’s risks and gave very little time to more reasoned and balanced viewpoints.

No doubt anyone with an interest in personal genomics has heard about 23andMe’s recent run-in with the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA has told them to stop marketing their Personal Genome Service because they didn’t have FDA approval for a diagnostic test. 23andMe has complied and now will only report ancestry and genealogy results to new customers.

After working as a data scientist in melanoma research for 6 years, I’ve come to appreciate the need for biobanking specimens, especially when studying rare diseases. The team I worked with at Yale would have never been able to collect the 150 specimens and blood samples needed to produce a large scale melanoma exome resequencing study without a concerted effort from physicians, patients, and biobankers to gather enough samples.

At 5AM Solutions, we make positive impacts in our clients’ software, and our clients’ software makes positive impacts on the world. As a 5AMer, I have developed software helping to power massively parallel targeted sequencing, variant analysis for research and clinical diagnostics, and bleeding edge assays for biotech startups. We tangibly move the state-of-the-art in the life sciences industry forward.

In our first two blog posts on color in UX design, Color Limitations and Color and Emotions we looked at some interesting facts about color and some of the context around their meaning. Part three brings these ideas together and provides tips for choosing color palettes for you designs and graphics.

The future of optimal health and cost effective, efficient care is dependent on the development of personalized medicine. Historically, scientific discovery and delivery of care has been developed from a one dimensional view of patients that assumed all individuals with a disease are the same – a one size fits all diagnosis and treatment regime which, over the past several decades, has failed to produce superior therapies and health outcomes.

I consider myself somewhat unique at 5AM in that I work remotely and I'm quality assurance focused. Being involved in this domain I enjoy knowing that I'm making a difference in lives through something I love doing. I also enjoy working at 5AM because we have a culture of quality. Our process and the people that make the process work are focused on improvement. 

This is the first post in our data modeling series. Today we give a broad perspective for different ways to represent knowledge and data. Some of our posts have talked about ontologies, controlled vocabularies, data models, and other kinds of knowledge representation. All of these share some commonalities, and exist along the Ontology (or sometimes Semantic) Spectrum.

Work is a vital and vibrant part of my life. 5AM's success is my two word job description. It has been for over 10 years no matter my role. At the core of 5AM are the people who did chose, do choose, and will choose to work here.