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Single Cell Portal is the one application that I claim to have been a part of the entire life of the project.  Originally conceived as a visualization prototype to showcase a handful of papers from the Regev Lab in 2016, Single Cell Portal has since grown into a cloud-based data visualization and sharing platform, with tens of thousands of users and hundreds of studies, many of which representing published, peer-reviewed publications.  Built primarily in Ruby on Rails, and on top of the Broad Institute's Terra analysis platform, Single Cell Portal allows researchers to share and collaborate on research projects, upload their processed data to our platform, which then powers a variety of interactive data visualizations to allow users to explore their data.  An ontologically-based search API allows researchers to discover other projects containing similar data to their own to perform downstream comparative analyses.  This is the without a doubt most ambitious and complex engineering project I have ever been a part of, and I could not have done so without the help and support of some of the smartest and most dedicated people I've ever known.

One of the pilot projects that eventually became Count Me In, the Metastatic Breast Cancer project was a revolutionary effort in direct-to-patient recruitment for clinical research.  It allowed patients with a life-threatening disease like metastatic breast cancer to sign up and legally consent to donate their data - their own DNA sequence - directly through the portal, without having to visit their oncologist.  What ensued was a host of discoveries and breakthroughs, and the launch of dozens of partner projects that grew into a movement that has since transformed how clinical research is performed.

I was only a part of MBC for a short while at the beginning, having inherited the almost-finished initial prototype just before it was due to be launched.  Over the next few years, I got to baby-sit the application, and had the joy of working with some really great people on a really, really important project.  I am grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of this amazing project.

Around the same time I was working with the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project, a similar opportunity came to me to work on another direct-to-patient registry for the AT Children's Project.  The concept was very similar, but focused on the disease Ataxia-telangiectasia, an exceedingly rare pediatric disease that only afflicts roughly 500 children worldwide.  As such, research into the disease was scant.  However, the patient population was a highly motivated one (as many rare diseases are).  It was the first time I'd ever been a part of a research project where I felt truly motivated to act.  I'd never been touched by this disease, but in meeting some of the families dealing with this horrible fate, I simply wanted to help, however I could.

This would also mark the first software project that I would be personally responsible for that would have actual patients and families as end users.  This was a huge responsibility that in retrospect I was not entirely prepared for, and it was a hard lesson at times.  But like all worthwhile things, in the end it was something I was immensely proud to have been a part of.  After I left the project, I learned that through the research that had been launched through this initiative, an actual candidate treatment for A-T had finally been developed, where none had existed before.  I am proud to say that I helped, in my own small way.