Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

"Don't want little Johnny or Betty to develop a crippling disease with the potential for lifelong paralysis? Then sign here and be a pioneer in improving global health!"

According to the World Heath Organization (WHO), 207 million people contracted malaria and  627,000 died from it in 2012. Additionally, there were 50 - 100 million cases of dengue in the world's tropical and sub-tropical regions. The good news: infection and mortality rates for both mosquito-borne illnesses are declining. The better news is that researchers may be on to a solution that targets these dangerous diseases at their source: the mosquitoes that carry malaria and dengue pathogens. 

Lab results must be returned to patients who request them

These Map of Biomedicine blog posts have been focused on how diagnostic tests get to market, from an interesting biological discovery to a test that your doctor can order to help guide your treatment or diagnose disease. We saw that there were different ways this could happen, with or without the involvement of the Food and Drug Administration.

If you were in elementary school more than twenty years ago, you learned that there were five senses and that management of those senses was highly localized. Your eyes see. Your tongue tastes. Your ears hear. Your skin feels, and your nose smells.

On Tuesday, Will FitzHugh blogged his thoughts about the big data conference that he attended last week, and in the post, he noted that "[a]s data sets grow, deriving useful knowledge from them becomes harder. This might seem counterintuitive, since scientific research often involves adding more data to be able to draw conclusions confidently."

Last week, I attended a  conference that focused on the big data needs of the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries. “Big data” -- like cloud computing or bioinformatics --  is one of those buzzwords that can be hard to define clearly. There’s confusion when people talk about it because they’re not always talking about the same thing.

I love kale. And arugula, and black coffee, and brussels sprouts. To me, these foods' bitterness is pleasant and, in the veggies' cases, they strike me as subtly sweet. I am a nontaster according to recent health research. Others are very sensitive to bitter flavors and cringe at the mere thought of -- for instance -- eating a radish plucked fresh from the garden. 

About 50 years before many of us began obsessively tracking our sleep, diets, and exercise habits on tiny,wearable devices, the medical director at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland,California began packing up his family to move to San Diego where he was going to launch a new program for Kaiser. With his house on the market, his family ready to go, and a newly appointed director in Oakland, Kaiser switched gears.

As we’ve seen in previous posts, the world of diagnostic test development is quite complicated. In addition to the multiple ways a diagnostic test can get to market, there are many different types of organizations that develop and run tests. Take a look at this zoomed-in view of the Map of Biomedicine: