Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

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.

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Tags: Big Data, map of biomedicine, 5AM, newborn screening

Earlier this month, I had the honor of attending the second Newborn Screening in Morocco Workshop, which tookk place at the School of Medicine and Pharmacy in the city of Fes. It is an amazing city that was founded in the 9th century and features an old city (or medina) that is the largest car-free urban area in the world. One of the world’s first universities was founded in Fes, and it is a center of arts, education and culture. These days, public health officials are establishing screening programs for newborns in the slightly-larger-than California-sized kingdom. 

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Tags: newborn screening

This week, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Newborn Screening Saves Lives Reauthorization Act. The bill supports continued funding and expansion for programs that identify, diagnose, and treat debilitating and potentially life-threatening illnesses as early as possible. 

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Tags: newborn screening

I'm very excited about a workshop I am attending next week. I've been invited to speak at Newborn Screening in Morocco in a city called Fes. After launching its first newborn screening pilot program in 2011, Morocco is starting to more regularly test newborns for a variety of conditions. An example  is Phenylketonuria (PKU), which is a rare genetic disorder that can cause serious health problems, but can be controlled with a modified diet.

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Tags: 5AM, newborn screening

It's no secret that we human beings will go to great lengths to keep our families safe and healthy. In the late 1940s, Dr. Robert Guthrie, a cancer doctor, learned that his son, John had mental retardation. About a decade later, after switching his focus to finding the causes of mental retardation, Dr. Guthrie's niece was born with phenylketonuria (PKU), a genetic disorder that prevents the body from metabolizing the amino acid phenylalanine. Untreated, PKU can lead to mental retardation. 

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Tags: genetic testing, 5AM, newborn screening