23andMe's Fall
wsj.com
wsj.com
If she can't convince her family, friends, and connections to pony up more cash, the company will likely be sold as the DNA and profile information has real value. I worry that it will go to PE (like Ancestry.com) or a global data broker that will strip-mine the assets in every evil way you can imagine (and maybe even some we can't).
The thing you need to consider when you give data to a company is not "will these people misuse this", but "once these guys go bankrupt and sell the data to the highest bidder, can it be misused?". See, for example, how if your company holds a large mailing list, it will typically be sold to a spam operation for a few bucks.
The minimum standard for giving serious personal information, like your DNA, to a company needs to be that the company receives a limited-time license to handle the data for the purposes they need to provide the service, and absolutely nothing more.
I'm completely uninformed in this area. Is there precedent for anything like this in the modern day?
Genetic information is also controlled by other laws such as GINA. So it is already some of the most controlled health data there is. But that's not a very high bar in the US.
It's not even really that unreasonable, if they want to advertise that they can provide health information, they don't get to pretend that they don't.
I agree with your limited license idea. It's just not ok that something like that can be dischargeable in bankruptcy. We don't have the ability to refuse consent in the first place, if our family provide it.
But where your parents have different SNPs, there's no way to derive which of them you inherited. What you said is a bit like saying that, because you know all of the cards in a deck of playing cards, you know what hand someone is holding, except in a counterfactual world where there are 10,000 possible cards and you know that a deck only has 52 of them.
People have a right to privacy from imprecise yet correct information about themselves. Someone wouldn't want to explain an abusive parent to a prospective employer, but they could see a strong tendency to, schizophrenia, with DNA data leaks.
This would depend on the terms you agreed to at the time you signed the account and submitted your data. I'm aware a lot of companies like to bury marketing disclosures under a busload of T&Cs. But if you didn't agree having your marketable data allowed to be sold the sale the to creditors can't backdoor it in. They can only reach out to you to opt into new terms, which you should refuse.
It was a bet worth trying, IMHO, but always a risky bet. And with bio, you don't find out if your bets work for a decade or more, because the iteration cycle is 10x slower than software for businesses/consumers.
Note, however, that SNPs like the one you pointed out are relatively infrequent. Amgen was expecting a two digit % improvement in their pharma pipeline by using GWAS insights.
If you mean that SNPs with small effect sizes don't always point to useful drug targets with big druggable effects, that is possible, but this remains an open question and is the subject of intensive research right now.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8129253/
They could help in stratifying patients and strategically targeted therapy. They can't be easily targeted (drugged) drirectly but they could lead to therapeutics if I understand correctly.
I'd be nice if they could be prevented from doing that, possibly by the court system.
(They do have valuable data, but it's the survey answers and friend and family connections. Nobody really cares you have a G at SNP 12213244243.)
The real killer would probably be around how useless healthcare regulation could make having most of that data. I'm not sure how far that really extends or what you manage to sign away by sending in your sample though.
But it's not useful for evil purposes because it's not /accurate/. It doesn't reveal all that much real additional information about your ancestry and health!
Since it's decided before you're born:
1. its effects are mostly already expressed and people can know them either by looking at you or (like life insurance) by making you get a medical exam before buying their services.
2. it can get out of date for cultural reasons. Your biological ancestry isn't always how you behave, like if you're adopted. Whereas last name + zip code is a pretty good predictor already.
But 23AndMe does have a lot of that information about their customers. The reason they have it is because they asked for it in surveys.
I'm not actually convinced that accuracy is all that important to the value of personal data. Or perhaps I should say I don't think think there's an accuracy floor at which the value drops to $0.
Was my B12 a dud, does everyone with this marker see improved results after supplements?
After all, they didn't need your genes when they were denying care in the 90s.
Like another comment said, I think the DNA data 23andMe gets from their swabs and analysis is likely inferior from a drug-dev standpoint vs. what the pro firms do linked with the genetic counseling teams.
In that light, 23andMe's options don't look good. However, probably good news for the patient. As I was told by a genetic counselor at one of the main hospital systems that do this, a bulk of their work is rolling back expectations from patients who did 23AM first, and then when to a GC.
I mean she was leader of YouTube. Why wouldn't she be able to develop a drug development strategy based on genomics?
But hey, rich people can do anything right?
Or maybe Palantir.
I was a heavy believer of 23andMe until this point. I answered all of the available research questions, which was a thing that took absolutely hours and was filled with semi-invasive medical questions. I did this under the premise that I would hopefully be helping research and I felt really rewarded having completed all of them. Then, they dropped the + bombshell and I felt really rugpulled. I paid them for genotyping on their v4 and v5 platforms -- so I paid twice, I referred friends, I bought people kits, I helped research...and now I was being asked to pay a subscription for what I was promised to begin with? Eesh.
I think the fundamental issue is that when the FDA stepped in and told 23andMe to cut back on their reporting that they really hit a roadblock. Promethease always gave better results than 23andMe, but when that happened it commoditized genotyping fully. Just download your data from any provider and use a third-party tool and you're set.
Fast forward to 2024 and they're stuck with a platform that's semi-limited and they haven't delivered on any of the research deliverables that many people wanted in the first place. The idea of getting new genetic reports monthly was appealing and simply never materialized. It's no surprise people aren't hot on this as a business -- but what is surprising is that they were completely passed by startups like Nebula Genomics in offering whole-genome sequencing and competitive data access. I think the stored data they have is their only advantage, but they don't seem to know how to leverage it.
I really wonder what happens to that data if they get acquired or shut down. The possible new owner of the data might have a completely different business case in mind. This scenario is something you usually don't consider when you give your data to a company that you trust at the moment.
Which is to say: No they wouldn't just do that, it would cut their business too much despite being a way to make more money per client.
But getting it from a company that already has it avoids that downside.
This scenario is something you usually don't consider when you give your data to a company that you trust at the moment.
Why would you not consider it?
But for the same reason I'm just a one time customer, all I needed was for 23andme to give me a very expensive hospital test at a 95% discount, and I didn't need them anumore
This is inescapable; genetics usually can't show causation, for instance because you can't do an experiment where you change someone's genes.
Geneticists seem to deal with this by using statistics like GWAS that are obviously just correlation, adding a sentence that correlation doesn't show causation, and then just proceeding and pretending like it does.
23andme went with the "only give very limited information" which I respect but is ultimately pretty much useless compared to just running your data against dbSNP and telling me that I have this or that marker for this or that disease backed by this or that paper.
Though if you find whatever gene is most correlated with something, what are the options for it not to be causation? If the chance of causation is high enough, it makes sense to proceed as if the risk is real.
There's a more advanced form of being bad at this where you think you can show causation by controlling for everything in the environment. This is also wrong; it produces something called collider bias.
> Though if you find whatever gene is most correlated with something, what are the options for it not to be causation?
1. It's a coincidence and it's never causal.
Imagine an OSS project releases a bugfix and you diff the old and new versions. (This is basically GWAS.)
The bugfix part of the diff caused it to be fixed. The updates to the copyright dates or changelogs didn't.
2. It's causal, but the causal chain involves a specific environmental factor, and we should change that instead.
For instance, you can say every human has a genetic disease that prevents them from producing their own vitamin C, which most other mammals can do. But instead of calling scurvy a genetic disease we just eat fruits and vegetables.
Half the point of analyzing statistics is to filter out coincidences, and that applies to correlations too. If something is a coincidence, it won't hold up as a proper correlation under reasonable amounts of analysis. So when the premise is we're starting with correlations, I think it's alright to assume they're mostly not coincidences.
> The bugfix part of the diff caused it to be fixed. The updates to the copyright dates or changelogs didn't.
In that case the bugfix is the "gene most correlated", isn't it? Give it a few generations to randomly spread, and the signal will be far stronger on the bugfix gene than on the copyright gene. (And if it hasn't been spreading for generations then you won't have enough samples to find either gene.)
> 2. It's causal, but the causal chain involves a specific environmental factor, and we should change that instead.
> For instance, you can say every human has a genetic disease that prevents them from producing their own vitamin C, which most other mammals can do. But instead of calling scurvy a genetic disease we just eat fruits and vegetables.
If you're testing just humans, you'll get a 0% correlation because everyone has that gene.
If you're testing across mammals, then "WARNING: Prone to scurvy". Which is a completely correct and causal result about a genetic problem, with easily accessible treatments.
So, I don't understand your example at all.
Have maybe a small ounce of humility in this respect.
Thousands of very smart people do a lot of dumb things. People still work on string theory. The people working on proper causal inference are also smart, work hard, and have Nobel Prizes.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2021/pop...
On the other hand, the people doing genetics who aren't careful about it produced the 23AndMe report which says I have a "17% chance of having green eyes". Against what counterfactual?
> In fact, you can correct for the exact problem you describe with sibling studies where people have the same environment but different genes.
"Correcting" is a wrong way to think about it. Generally speaking, overcorrection is worse than undercorrection because of collider bias. You need to choose a study design that's correct in the first place.
You're describing a natural experiment, which is better than a GWAS of self-selected 23AndMe customers, but does have problems (silly one: selection bias because the sample only includes people with siblings) and more importantly is only guaranteed in the study environment (eg people who live in the UK in 2008) but gets reported without identifying what that environment is.
> You need to choose a study design that's correct in the first place.
That's precisely what a sibling study is: a study design that's correct in the first place, as far as the problem we're discussing goes.
> You're describing a natural experiment
That is correct: a sibling study, which corrects for the problem we're discussing, often contains aspects of a natural experiment, namely that the siblings tend to naturally be siblings, rather than raised together purely for the purpose of a study :)
Apparently 23andMe doesn't let you download the data anymore, I just tried. I wanted to give Promethease a go, seems interesting.
I think getting the results of one of these tests would be interested, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it, due to trust issues related to handing over something like that to a company with an unproven track record when it comes to privacy and integrity. I figured it was only a matter of time before they were hacked or they decided to sell out their users for profit. They’ve already been hacked, so now it’s time to see what they willingly do with that data when their back is against the wall.
I wish I could get a test done by a lab, be given the results, and have that be the end of it. No accounts, no forever records kept by the lab/company. Just a simple testing service that isn’t trying to be a tech company.
EMR has put paid to this pretty handily. Every positive STD test anyone ever gets from now on is yours for the taking if you can crack LabCorp's database.
“Entrepreneurs are not at all like ordinary businessmen. An entrepreneur who is not in trouble closes no avenues, keeps a lot of balls in the air, and will never tell you the whole truth when a half-truth will do. An entrepreneur who is in trouble will lie, cheat, and steal. He will smuggle cocaine or ship bricks. We should never measure an entrepreneur by the standards of a rock-solid businessman.” — attributed to Kenneth Rind[1]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28060166
[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=MQvGc8Ee1SsC&pg=PA137&lpg=...
> "We should never measure an entrepreneur by the standards of a rock-solid businessman".
Is the author saying that a rock-solid businessman follows a higher code of ethics?
Exactly.
There's more than one kind of rock-solid.
Someone who is a rock-solid entrepreneur will not lie, cheat, or steal whether they are in trouble or not.
OTOH an "ordinary" non-entrepreneurial businessman may just be one who has not faced trouble (may also have a lot less risk of that) and not started to lie, cheat, or steal. Yet. But may do so any minute at the drop of a hat and you would never know.
No need for a difference in codes of ethics, rather different kinds of rock-solid for thee than me.
It's easy to remember when Enron was a rock-solid client, packed with ordinary businessmen from ordinary business schools and typical backgrounds, until one day it wasn't. Wasn't rock-solid that is, and able to pay. All the businessmen there remained ordinary after that regardless, except for the few whose ethical transgressions were among the "unavoidable handful" for which there were serious legal implications.
Entrepreneurs are strongly driven by ego, their identity is personally tied to the thing they’re doing. There is immense pressure to succeed, not just for the money, but for their personal validation. It’s not enough to succeed, people must see you succeed.
Otherwise, they’d just open some boring small business no one cares about instead of a hot new startup.
Same here. Imagine the value of this data in the hands of insurance companies that are willing to misuse it. Will we, as a society, be able to prevent that "value" from being realized?
[0]: https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/dtcgenetictes...
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
In reality, there will be (and probably already is) an impenetrable web of "data aggregators" buying genome data from other aggregators who are buying it from still other aggregators, so that the info will be thoroughly laundered by the time it actually gets to the insurance company to hike your premiums. This both obscures its true origin and lets there be a little contractor to throw under the bus when discovered and deflect blame. Don't fucking kid yourself: if personal genome data is useful, it will be used, no matter what the law says.
The company hasn't the funds (or time) to develop drugs and I'm not sure why any investors would invest in them rather than a company with a track record of doing so or a potential drug.
Selling their customers data to other companies (or partnering with) that can create drugs from it would seem the logical choice, along with "subscription health reports" and anything tacked onto the DNA/blood profiling/testing product to keep the data coming in.
Attempting to discover drugs is a proven way to make a small fortune by starting with a large fortune. Everything north of the Charles River in Boston would vanish if people stopped believing though.
Was there an issue with targeting sub-populations for clinical trials beforehand?
At an ELI5 level, if you're hoping your drug candidate will help cure disease X, you sign up patients with disease X to join your clinical trial. That's not the hard part!
(source: family member works at $bigPharma)
a) If you suspect there is a significant pharmacogenetics component to what you are studying (or related to disease progression).
b) You're working on something preventative.
From a previous job I worked at (we made PCR tests), there was interest on screening for APOE genotypes to enrich an Alzheimer's drug trial - drug maker believed that APOE genotype would have a significant impact on drug performance.
But you're absolutely right that you can often (usually?) do 'enough' enriching without genetic information.
An example of this is when they tested the covid vaccine, they wanted to make sure they had enough participation from African American and other ethnicities since these were usually under represented in clinical trials relative to the population, and there are sometimes subtle variations in the way peoples body respond to drugs depending on their race.
To find new targets yes but to develop a drug to market (and revenue/profit) takes 10-15 years. Even a drug to a state that gets approved for human testing seems beyond what they could do themselves without so much funding it would wipe out the existing shareholders. Selling to/Partnering with other drug companies with targets they've discovered/IP from DNA etc would seem more realistic.
Perhaps ok for a startup, not ok for a many years old established company.
In the words of Boromir: "One does not just become a drug company."
Haven't they already been trying this ... for years?
(Way back in 2018): "GSK and 23andMe sign agreement to leverage genetic insights for the development of novel medicines"
https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/gsk-and-23and...
(1) Is that being associated with a penis pill pusher is brand destruction. Any normal person would get this right away without trying but executives just can’t see what their actions look like to their customers.
(2) It’s a form of achievement laundering. Lemonaid health failed, pure and simple. A circle jerk acquisition is alchemy that turns a failed business into an apparent success, now the founders, management and people who invested in it will get accolades for being successful when really the Silicon Valley Mafia stole from public investors to maintain its image.
It ought to be a lot harder for businesses to get acquired. Maybe we need a vote by the customers, maybe when Google buys a company they should be required to spend a 1/4 of the money on ads warning people that the business could get shut down, etc.
Why would it be surprising to value the latter kind of business higher than the former?
If you either create a brand new market, or are taking on a drastically undeserved market... you absolutely need to be growing faster than inflation. Or your brand new company would be worth $1 the first year, $1.03 the second year..
Even outpacing inflation by 1.2 - 2 times. It's not insane growth, but it is consistent. Better yet is that they tend to have a decent number of assets too.
> It’s really hard to grow a business at 10 or 500 times that rate.
How often is 10 to 500 times growth seen in reality? I think most start-ups fail before the second year.
> Why would it be surprising to value the latter kind of business higher than the former?
Highly stable and proven growth as opposed to highly unstable and unreliable growth.
The small business is successful and so the calculus as to what it is worth is much more explicit.
The extreme example of this is commercial real estate with a long-term tenant (think: the person who owns the land a post office is sitting on). Everything is known (lease length, amounts, current interest rates, etc, etc) that the value/sale price is a simple formula.
It's a cliché what we say about connections and success, etc. and so forth. But that WSJ article really hammered how in this case how absolutely tied to connections this company, and her wealth, were, and how luck plays a role. In a business idea people are saying should have been doomed.
People are discussing all sorts of details about the company's business strategy, what they should have done with all the data, whether that data is useless, what they might do with it now, whether they should be allowed to, etc. Someone pointed out the GSK investment which was interesting.
But to me all this is trumped by the human element - how having the right neighbor, or boyfriend, or sister's boyfriend, can propel you to the top with unimaginable wealth. Something worth thinking about as we are on a forum run by a startup network: Given what we have learned here how meritorious is success in Silicon Valley really?
But something tells me the sisters aren't going to be starving any time soon. I don't know her assets but I suspect even with a failed business there's a few million in real estate and savings set aside, even if her big ownership in the business is in the penny stock category. A position that many of us wouldn't mind.
And, I never met Susan who ran YouTube, but I have heard she's very capable.
They really were on the forefront at that time, and have been an research powerhouse ever since[1] , but struggled for some time to find a sustainable revenue stream for their discoveries. Shortly after the turn of the millenium they came out with DNA diagnostic kits, that were able to diagnose various things known or thought to increase likelihood of various illnesses and conditions. And this product even came onto the market before 23andme.
But since 2012 (I think) they have been an independent research subsidiary of the US pharmaceutical company Amgen, where Amgen then can capitalize on the research output to make the drugs in question (and probably much more that we are not privy to).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCODE_genetics
[1]: https://www.decode.com/publications/
edit: wording and spelling
I didn’t renew my services with them. 1) I didn’t gain any value out of it, 2) their consistent blame of users that used recycled password for their breach.
I use ancestry.com as I’m working on dual citizenship with my family’s home country and find it worth the value. I was able to trace my family back through the Colonial Revolution all the way to the 1500s in Germany. That’s worth my money. Not 23andMe.
After reading this article I decided to download my data in case they go under. Was greeted with this message on the relevant page. Does anybody have some insight if this is related to the data breach or something else?
If you email them about it, you just basically get a copy-pasta reply restating the message on the site, and if you keep emailing them 3+ times asking for a refund (ask me how I know), they'll tell you you can manually upload identity verification and they'll get back to you in 6-8 weeks with the data.
My guess is also that they use the hack as an excuse to keep people in.
https://lawforbusiness.usc.edu/direct-to-consumer-generic-te...
Hint, the "I" in HIPAA stands for "insurance." A general rule - if an insurance company isn't involved HIPAA doesn't apply. HIPAA is a law that regulates insurance companies and entities that deal directly with insurance companies, not "medical data."
HIPAA doesn't apply to 23andMe. At all. HIPAA only applies to "covered entities" - https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities...
Not exactly. If you go to most any healthcare provider, and pay out-of-pocket, HIPAA still applies. More accurately, HIPAA applies to any healthcare providers who transmits any health information in electronic form in connection with a transaction covered by 45 C.F.R. §160.103. Or in other words, basically every healthcare provider is also a covered entity, unless they're completely 100% cash only and don't take insurance for anyone ever. Do these even exist?
Although, still 23andMe wouldn't be covered because they're not providing healthcare services.
This is correct - I should have been more specific. If a business doesn't take insurance then HIPAA doesn't apply. Not that insurance isn't involved in a specific transaction. I've edited my GP comment to be more specific.
>Do these even exist?
Yes, absolutely.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/these-doctors-accept-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/your-money/dealing-with-d...
https://www.fawkeshealth.com/insights/are-cash-only-clinics-...
So-called "pill mills" are almost always cash-only when they operate.
There's also health centers on university campuses that are funded through student fees and don't bill insurance.
I get new updated health information from 23andme perhaps 2 times per year. It's mind boggling to imagine that with all the research being done that is all that makes the cut as interesting and trsutworthy enough for 23andme to tell me about it.
In other words, a majorly failed content strategy based on fear of being shut down for providing insufficiently vetted health info.
Meanwhile, someone created multiple accounts and the ancestry results didn't match even when collected from the same person.
I have some pills for you. Just for you, mind you. Special made. Sign up for this subscription and we’ll send you a new supply each day…
I'm not looking for a single source of authority and I will not be disappointed if an updated "chip" or study reverses a previous recommendation/insight.
23andme had a blog post about the MTHFR gene and why they don't include it. I'm not there to read the blog I want to know interesting things about my own genetics, even if what is interesting is that they don't think it matters! This is just bad content strategy even if it's justifiable from a "healthcare" perspective.
Why so much worry about a customer getting the wrong impression from one of the health reports? Seems a bit absurd. How much money did it cost to put in place all the warnings about the potentially upsetting impact of various mutations.
I wish that 23andme had focused on being an entertaining way for people to discover more interesting stuff about themselves, rather than a rarefied place where only the most well-vetted research is acknowledged to exist.
Look, I give her great credit for the women in STEM thing, her perseverance in the light of obstacles, and making a 10$ lab kit worth $399 to buyers. But to not understand how far actors would go to get hold of that data, to not understand that the drug industry is brutal because humans are poorly-understood meatsacks (see: anything by Derek Lowe), well, seems like that Yale education didnt impart a whole heap of reflective thinking skills.
Can you elaborate? Does this mean they've added $389 in value, or they swindled people of $389?
If it's the former, what did they do to create that value? (Not being snarky, I don't know enough about their business and am legitimately curious. There seems to be a lot of comments here about unfulfilled promises.)
Personally, I roll my eyes any time someone questions "value". If a customer is willing to pay $399, then obviously they put the value of whatever the results may be from it at at least $399.
"It's not a pencil, it's the thing that writes the next Moby Dick" - that sort of thing.
The consumer side is clearly struggling because of the problems mentioned in the article (they only need one test in their life, public perception is bad because their security has had breaches). So this needs a pivot where you can change the public's perception from a one-time test to continuous health monitoring through blood markers or something similar, expand to tests other than genetic and make it a repeatable, accurate test that gives you more information (and obviously stop leaking people's data).
But why not focus on the B2B side? Sell access to their databases. I'm sure computational biology and/or pharma companies need this information. It makes sense to do vertical integration by manufacturing your own drugs, but not for a cash-strapped business that has little incoming revenue to sustain further development. Presumably they are selling their genetic data, but I don't get why it's not giving them a revenue stream. Let GSK manufacture the drugs using your genetic info, with a profit share for any drugs made this way. They mention a collaboration with GSK in the article, but why was this stopped?
"Stop leaking data"? Sounds like a step forward.
> But why not focus on the B2B side? Sell access to their databases.
So, it's actually: try to sell your customers' data instead of leaking it? :O
Sorry if that sounds snarky, but are we sure there are enough customers who want to pay to give their data to a company so that company can immediately sell their data on to other companies?
Are you sure?
I mean, presumably there are different types of DNA testing. Doesn't 23andme run basically the cheapest test they can get away with? A user can't tell if the test measured 16 bytes or 1.6 gigabytes of genetic information, and if I was trying to launch a consumer DNA geneology service, I'd want to get network effects, so I'd want a test that was very easily affordable.
Who says their records are thorough enough to be valuable to drug companies?
No. That's part of why they're test is so expensive and their financials are so lackluster. They are apparently using a customized version of the lllumina's Global Screening Array according to their website and several other sources that show up in search results. That's a legit research quality genotyping platform from a world leading laboratory in the genetics space. This post from 2020 has a decent high level overview about it in the context of 23&me [0] though it might be slightly outdated by now and I've never heard of the company (xcode?) that wrote it (nor did I bother to look at what their product is.)
> If I was trying to launch a consumer DNA geneology service, I'd want to get network effects, so I'd want a test that was very easily affordable.
That's a pretty neive perspective. It ignores the value propositions of 23&me's product, economies of scale in the direct to consumer genetic testing space which were in large part enabled by 23&me's success, and all of the thorny bits related to questions about accuracy when presenting results. Not to mention that 23&me certainly capitalized on the network effect (which is being criticized a fair amount in this thread.)
> Who says their records are thorough enough to be valuable to drug companies?
GSK. See my other comment in this thread [1]
[0] https://www.xcode.life/23andme/23andme-v5-chip-dna-raw-data-...
In 2018 GSK made a $300M equity investment in 23andMe as part of a 4 year collaboration (with the option to extend for a fifth year) under which GSK had exclusive access to their data for use in drug target discovery programs, but [0]:
> All activities within the collaboration will initially be co-funded (50%/50%), with either company having certain rights to reduce its funding share for any collaboration programme.
So it seems they not only lost out on 5 years of developing their B2B business, but committed to covering a portion of the R&D costs over that period as well. There were terms about profit sharing on new developments, so it was a bet.
It doesn't sound like it worked out quite as well as either sided hoped though because in October 2023 (after the 5 year agreement) they entered into another agreement but this time [1]:
> Under an amendment to their Collaboration Agreement, 23andMe will receive a $20 million upfront payment for a one year, non-exclusive data license. > [...] > for a 12-month period, and [23andMe will] offer its research services for analyses of the data over that same period. Any new drug discovery programs that GSK chooses to initiate during the agreement will be owned and advanced solely by GSK.
[0]: https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/gsk-and-23and...
[1]: https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
> Sequoia, which invested $145 million in 23andMe, still holds all its shares, he said. Today they are worth $18 million.
Interesting that they weren't forced to liquidate/distribute the shares to their LPs
I smell a conspiracy theory.
1. your DNA results are not interesting to anyone even if they're evil.
2. if someone wanted your DNA in particular, they just need a bit of your hair, so there is already absolutely nothing you could do to stop them.
I would imagine that any fund is allowed to make losses on specific investments, least of all a hyper-aggressive VC fund which will create losses on many (most) positions, by design. And then once losses happen they should be treated for what they are - just another position where decisions should be made based on the outlook, and not based on the history.
"Sequoia is abandoning the 10-year venture fund, in which limited partners, the outside investors that contribute to the fund, expect to get paid back over a decade. The firm said it’s establishing a single fund, the Sequoia Fund, that will raise money from LPs and then funnel that capital down to a series of smaller funds that invest by stage.
Proceeds from those funds will feed back into the Sequoia Fund. With no time horizon, Sequoia can hold public stock for longer stretches, rather than distributing those shares to LPs. Investors who want liquidity can pull money out instead of waiting for distributions."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/26/sequoia-changes-fund-structu...
If a healthcare startup get shout-outs from Oprah, SNL and branded Barbie dolls, is that a bad sign?
I don’t understand how anyone ever thought 23andMe had a viable business model selling a test that only needed to be done once(and apparently selling it at a loss to boot)
There's a reason that these complex undertakings are made by boring conglomerate companies that have decades of experience in the industry, produce many different products in that sector, and whose CEOS don't try to get on the covers of magazines.
BTW, I have quite a lot of back hair. Most of the other physical features are wrong.
I give it 10 years time before it turns into a town just living on its old glory, with tourist attractions like:
- "This used to be a bar where Google's exec team drank"
or
- "This was the hotel Mark Zuckerberg threw an Oculus Rift into the pool"
or
- "Oracle datacentre re-enactment theme park, with real old beard Oracle DBA you can interact with"
Reference: https://youtu.be/AUrHVWa3s2Y
The reason it looks like we have magic fiscal policy and Europe doesn't is that Europe just loves austerity and refuses to print money basically because they're stubborn. They could and should do it too.
In an alternate reality, you probably could have structured 23andme into a company making modest net profit. But that would not have matched the 6 billion price valuation either. And it's quite likely that a substantial part of the R&D burn was because they recognized the limitations of their core product.
https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
Now we know that most effects are small, and there aren’t useful interventions that can treat the effects.
Last time I researched it the estimate was 5-6 digits, but I'm sure technology advancements have made it cheaper. What happened to that $1000 nanopore?
I have some acquaintances with lab experience who could run this, and could split the costs between friends and family. Everyone gets their own data, no copies are made, all samples are destroyed. We can resell the equipment after to recover some of the costs.
This is the best way to be sure about the data not leaking or getting sold to boost CEO bonus.
I want to buy a machine, observe the whole process myself and then destroy/scrub the machine.
https://nanoporetech.com/products/sequence/minion
Sequencing DNA with nanopores: Troubles and biases https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8486125/
Based on what I'm seeing from 23andMe's website they only do genotyping, not sequencing.
https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/227968028...
"23andMe uses genotyping, not sequencing, to analyze your DNA. Sequencing technology has not yet progressed to the point where it is feasible to sequence an entire person’s genome quickly and cheaply enough to keep costs down for consumers. It took the Human Genome Project, a consortium of multiple research labs, over 10 years to sequence the whole genomes of just a few individuals."
Edit: https://www.23andme.com/total-health
I guess they started providing whole exome sequencing, but I can't find information about what depth they're doing it at.
Of course the closer to a full sequence the better as any future research could be used by just reading existing data. But realistically just having data on few hundred most useful markers is enough.
I have no regrets, and still rooting for them.
There is something magical that I could spit in a tube, and my cousin could spit in a tube, and then weeks later we got emails saying "Out of millions of users we found your cousin just from spit!"
As kids we are lied to about a lot (the big guy in a red suit, for example), so part of growing up is verifying that what you are taught is actually true. If you did not major in biology, you don't have an easy way to verify that what you are told about genetics, DNA, and evolution is true. 23andMe provided that easy test for the layperson. I think that alone is worth the hundred bucks.
The joy I got from verifying DNA is at the core of life is like the joy I got from Intro to Electrical Engineering, building my first circuit with logic gates, and realizing that indeed everything is built up of 1s and 0s.
It seems they haven't developed more of a business beyond that novelty. I think I was expecting they would come out with future innovative offerings, given that their first was cool and done pretty well.
I was never crazy about the drug development plan. Seems like a more logical first step would be to combine with a fitness wearable company (Goog/Fitbit, Apple, Oura Ring, Whoop, Garmin, Samsung, etc), that there might be valuable insights from those datasets merged.
The other had an idea.
Make sure you are the co-founder with the sustainable advantage
but more of an object lesson that as the needs of the company change, the board/your co-founders will constantly re-evaluate whether you are still adding value.
In a sane world this thing should have never work in the first place but given the world is full of morons who are dumb enough to actually pay for shit like that its quite an accomplishment to run a company like that into the ground.
I read articles of people sending in banana DNA 23AndMe or a similar service and they got a supposedly ancestry tracking back. These services are dubious at best and you literally sign your DNA away to be sold to the highest bidder in their terms. I would not do this FOR FREE, let alone pay a ridiculous $130 for it.
For example, if done right, you need to decrypt with some form of passcode/system on boot, etc, etc. But once "unlocked" the system has access to the data, and usually the hackers come in via the "live" system.
Things like backups are usually encrypted but not always, but the number of incidents of people stealing physical media is pretty low compared to ransomware/remote hacks.
Since there are usually significant costs to encrypting production databases, such as CPU utilization, many organizations choose to focus on other security controls. Data encryption is just one of many security controls at play in a scenario such as this and the security team has to carefully pick their battles to avoid just being completely ignored as the "say no to everything" guys.
“In 2007, Cusenza left to join Nodal Exchange as CEO the following year. Avey left in 2009 and co-founded Curious, Inc. in 2011.”
Cusenza is not mentioned in the article (he was president, too) and evidently Avey didn’t just “leave”.
- A burst of people take your DNA test
- Much less people will subsequently, as your target becomes younger people who are now old enough to pay for DNA tests.
Seems like you'd have to whether being way under-capacity for the initial burst, and then essentially a return to normal.
Why does it specify "nongenetic"? Is it because the passwords were exposed? Doesn't that mean that any information accessible with those passwords can also be considered breached?
For a developer plus a scientist it is teally difficult to get the health data from the raw ADN and using current (Python?) modules?
The further you move from obvious disease-causing or high-risk mutations the more expertise you need. But even there you need where to look and how to present the results.
The real (honest) question is what such reports cover and what qre the precision/recall? Answering that requires far more than duct-taping a few python modules.
23andMe never had a business plan, but it didn't matter because their investors figured they had the connections to make it work (look at the explanation of how they booted out the other founder). Their Libertarian/lazy attitude towards regulation is just an example of how couldn't be bothered to even do the necessary homework. Their attitude towards their data breach is another.
Makes me wonder how good their science is. I don't know anyone on that side of their business, but comments from friends who used to work their about how their parts worked are not encouraging.
https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=1180808593353&w=TdklVuJENI...
(archive.is will not work in some parts of the world)
Just in case, you know, your DNA changes /s
I attended Ann's talk at Google when she was still with Sergey. They had spit kits in case anyone wanted to do it on the spot (I didn't).
When President Clinton announced the completion of the human genome project, he looked forward to all the wonderful drugs that would follow therefrom. Then I took a number of extension classes in molecular biology and drug discovery, and learned from the people who actually do it that DNA information is often helpful, but it's not a silver bullet.
> Sequoia, which invested $145 million in 23andMe, still holds all its shares, he said. Today they are worth $18 million.
.. and this is why those VCs get the big bucks /s
It absolutely does. That's how cancer occurs btw. The term is "somatic mutations".
https://bmcmedgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4009603/
Speaking of detecting cancer indirectly, it is actually the fact that sometimes you can detect tumors (early) because their DNA or RNA products reach the blood or other bodily fluids (cfDNA/cfRNA for "circulating free"). It is a big and a recent thing - for many cancer types e.g. lung there was basically no easy way to test. Biopsies are very invasive obviously....
What happens is that in B cells the DNA that encodes antibodies' binding regions actually mutate upon B cell maturation. Similar for T cells.
The term is "V(D)J recombination".
That is a pretty awful click-bait title. Presumably the "$0" is in reference to their sub $1 share price?
The fact that they put everything behind a paywall _and_ slap on click-bait titles is confusing to me. I can't imagine paying for access to that type of writing.
Looking at those financials... yikes. I am kind of shocked how poorly they are doing.
Their huge problem is hackers. All the latest news is how hackers have grabbed up those databases.
What's likely to happen, they'll self restructure, get to profitability, start a stock buyback program. But IF and WHEN?