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Your personal health: The dirt on 23andme

By Deepak Singh | Published: September 13, 2007

What better way to kick of this series with some juice about 23andme.

Looks like someone spilled the beans. I actually first read this on GigaOm, where Om Malik reported on a Forbes piece about 23andme. For better or for worse, 23andme is forever linked to Google, due to Anne Wojcicki’s marital status (she is married to Sergey Brin). Add to that the fact that Google invested in the company (along with Genentech), and the mainstream’s media’s interest in the company is well understood.

Anyway, getting back to the news of the day. Apparently, Illumina CEO Jay Flatley sketched out some of 23andme’s plans at an investor conference. The salient bits

  • Customers will collect their own samples, saliva or cheek swabs (similar to the genographic project) and send the samples to Illumina for genotyping (Illumina is one of the two leading providers of microarrays for genotyping)
  • 23andme will take all the SNP information from the genotyping studies, and provide the web services that customers will use to access their information
  • The initial emphasis will be on genealogy, again hardly a surprise since this is a simpler problem, but disease-related SNPs are also somewhere in the picture

As a software and web services geek, I am already intrigued by a bunch of things (this applies to competitor Navigenics as well). What kind of search capabilities will 23andme provide? What will be the scope? How will the data be presented? Apart from the obvious privacy questions, which I am sure all the companies are spending a lot of time trying to figure out, the key is going to be value. In other words, what is the value customers are going to get from having access to their own SNP data, how are they going to be able to use it, and will it be worth the cost?

The challenges are going to lie in customer education. If someone is carrying a SNP that has been implicated in a disease, what does it mean to the customer? I hope the web service will include ample tool tips and help so that people don’t get overwhelmed by their genetic information. The current goals of these companies are just the tip of the iceberg. When the general population gets access to these services, and for more than just genealogy, then the real fun will start.

This is a space that the main stream media will be following closely. Hopefully the coverage will be responsible and not sensationalist, because this is a pretty serious matter. I did get a chuckle from Flatley’s observation that he carried his own information on his iPhone.

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  • Kay
    And I hope that the PG hype and the overwhelming media presence of diet evangelists will not obscure the fact that a big portion of decisions like "who will live long", "who will contract disease X" and such like is just plain old random noise. There is little doubt that on the population scale, or the cohort scale, genetic and dietary factors will have a big impact. However, for the individual, I am not at all sure. In addition, it might be an unpopular thought, but there are in fact diseases that are not at all influenced by the diet.
  • I just hope that the hype will not grow to a point were people forget how much the environment shapes the outcomes. When the "Craigome" came out in PLoS Biology all the sound clips in CNN were about how much we will be able to predict from our genomes etc. To make any sense of the SNP data a lot of cultural habits, diet information, etc will have to be collected as well. How comfortable will people be in centralizing this much information in a private company ?
  • This is really interesting. It's good to know that 23andme have some genuine plans for services, rather than being some dubious Google-linked tax dodge - not that any of us ever thought such a thing.

    As you say, it raises a ton of issues regarding data delivery, privacy, public education. Knowing your own genome is potentially quite scary. Knowing how to interpret it (having a certain feature may not necessarily mean that you or your descendants will have a certain condition) is even scarier. On the other hand, it may alter health behaviour for the better. Would people be more likely to quit smoking, exercise more, eat less saturated fats knowing that they were predisposed to atherosclerosis? A large percentage of them surely would.

    We're living through the infancy of personalised genomes and medicine - a lot of hype and no delivery at the moment, but I'm starting to think that it is going to happen, perhaps sooner than we think. Maybe even in our lifetimes.
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