Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

Craig Venter, the scientist who made a name for himself more than a decade ago by challenging the NIH-funded Human Genome Project, has a new venture. Last week he announced Human Longevity, Inc. The company, according to their press release, is “focused on extending the healthy, high performance human life span” and is going to “tackle the diseases associated with aging-related human biological decline”.

In a previous blog entry we discussed the use of personas in developing an effective user experience. One persona we introduced was the biomedical researcher. This is obviously a very broad category, so let’s break it down a little bit.

5AM is thrilled to be playing a part in the upcoming 2012 Sage Bionetworks Commons Congress in San Francisco, April 20-21. The aim of the Congress is to positively impact the pace at which medical research operates. 5AM was founded with similar goals, principles, and themes, so our participation in the Congress is natural – to speed the path of discovery in disease and treatment of patients requires knowledge, assessment, sharing, and visualization of lots of data, and we believe that software’s a great way to do that. We were happy to work with John Wilbanks (one of Sage’s Directors and a Fellow of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation) on a project that will be unveiled at this year’s Congress: Portable Legal Consent.

During bioinformatics engagements, many of our clients use Microsoft Excel for working with their data. Indeed, the projects often begin and end with the delivery of a spreadsheet. Although Excel is ubiquitous and has many attractive features, there are some common pitfalls. This blog post details the first of the five issues we take a look at--To dowload the full "Using Excel for Bioinformatics Data" whitepaper, featuring five common issues and some great solutions, click here.

I have been designing assays for some time now. Starting with a few oligos in graduate school, I kicked up my PCR primer design experience out of school when I went to work for a genome center. Then there was my first blunder--ordering a few hundred dollars worth of primers with the reverse primers in the wrong orientation. I broke the news to my boss, resignation letter in hand (it hadn’t occurred to me that we probably spent more than that in one week just on pizza). Later in my career, the stress level went up a few orders of magnitude when I had to design tens of thousands of probes for SNP genotyping panels. That’s when I developed my addiction to TUMS^® and came to the realization that my reward for a job well done was invisibility. With assay design, people only look for you when something’s wrong.

President Obama proclaimed this week (September 11 – 17, 2011) as Health Information Technology Week. The focus of the week is to educate people – physicians, policy-makers, researchers, and the healthcare community – about the value of health IT. The president encourages us to "learn more about the benefits of Health IT by visiting HealthIT.gov, take action to increase adoption and meaningful use of Health IT, and utilize the information Health IT provides to improve the quality, safety, and cost effectiveness of health care in the United States.”