Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

Last night, the three-night documentary series "Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies" based on Siddartha Mukherjee's bestselling book premiered on PBS. In the first episode, the filmmakers traced the disease's history from a reference in a 15-foot, 4,000-year-old Egyptian medical parchment (under cures it reads: "There is none.") to the present, at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University, where two families are facing unimaginably difficult decisions about how to treat their children's leukemia.

Liberia was poised to be the first of the three hardest-hit countries stricken with the Ebola epidemic to declare itself free from the deadly virus that has ravaged the region for a year. The West African nation had gone two weeks without a new infection; and then a 44-year-old street vendor developed a fever. Her teenaged daughter, who'd tended to her sick mother developed a telltale headache.

Is healthcare technology good enough? Robert M. Wachter, M.D., Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF says no. Or at least not most of it yet. He claims that most of the electronic medical records systems used in hospitals are so bad, that some physicians seeking new positions think that not having an EMR system is a perk.

Last week, a Reddit user posted a link to an interesting project via the social media site’s You Should Know sidebar. It began, “YSK you can send a scoop of dirt from your backyard to a research group that will analyze it for new antibiotic elements and other medicines.”

Last week, Apple announced that it had released the first generation of ResearchKit. For those of us working to bring the internet to healthcare, the Web blew up with strong opinions about it. Whether you are for or against the new platform, it has to be acknowledged that it is an important step toward further uncloaking the world of biomedicine and making it accessible to lay consumers in the healthcare marketplace.

A couple of weeks ago, we blogged about the strides being made to combat melanomas by releasing the brakes on the immune system. Last week, the FDA approved Bristol-Myers Squibb's Opdivo (nivolumab), an immunotherapy drug that has had dramatic results in lengthening the lives of patients with some late-stage melanomas.

Last night, 5AM Solutions' Chief Science Officer Will FitzHugh was among the honorees at SmartCEO magazine's Washington Executive Management Awards. If you haven't worked with him directly, you might know Will from this blog. Most recently, he was the author of the Map of Biomedicine series (stay tuned for an upcoming ebook...) and he has also written about newborn screening and big data.

Misao Osaka -- the world's oldest person -- turned 117-years-old today. When asked how she achieved such an advanced age, Mrs. Osaka claims to be as baffled as most of us about the secret to longevity. "I wonder about that, too," she tells a reporter. 

Drug development is a long, expensive process with a very high failure rate. In a 2011 commentary in the journal Science Translational Medicine, NIH director Francis Collins described it like this: