I didn't follow competitors too closely, but Color may be what you're looking for. I don't know if they sell direct to consumer though.

If you use 23andMe, and request data deletion, they will do a best effort to delete the data. It's part of their GDPR requirement. When I was there, I worked on this project and they put a lot of effort into it. A big chunk of engineering org focused GDPR compliance for a month or two. They definitely don't intentionally keep data around if you request deletion.

The one caveat is that data deletion is hard, and its possible that some gets accidentally retained. I left the company over 5 years ago, so I don't know how good their deletion process is now.

One final note: to keep costs low, 23andMe doesn't look at your whole genome. They only look at a handful of "SNPs" in your genome that are known to be significant. If you've heard how we share 99.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, this is what they're basing this on. They look at the <0.5% of DNA that commonly varies between humans.

The reason I mention this is that, if you're very interested in your DNA sequencing, you may want to opt for a higher cost service that does full genome analysis. I don't know any names but I believe there are some DNA services that do this.

Not directly, afaik they never transferred the data.

However they sold access to the data to a bug pharma company (GSK). This was widely publicized. Not sure if that counts: GSK had some ability to look at the data but didn’t have an on premise copy of it.

Also, I worked on the GDPR deletion project. I can attest that they do best effort to delete your data when your request that. At least when I was there, this was the case. One caveat is for coding errors, oversights and bugs.

I did not, but that’s because I joined late and had a high strike price. I also turned down a second market offer to sell at around $15/share. Oops.

Many people sold during internal private liquidity events, and they did well. If you joined early you did well.

Only the ones who cashed out on the private market before the company went public

No, generally not. 23andMe only ever did ISOs prior to the SPAC merger, not RSUs, and they had a quite high strike price. There was a 6 month insider lock up against selling, so by the time most of us could sell, the price had tanked. By the time I was able to sell, the share price was so low that only my oldest options from when I started at the company in 2014 were in the money.

I ended up making a few 10s of thousands. Not the 100s it would have taken to compensate for the low pay for all those years. And I probably did better than most by selling what I could when I could. Most people weren't in the money at all.

Maybe if you timed the market perfectly you could have done well. I don't know that anyone did.

The company bet heavily on pharma/genomics, and it was a bad bet.

When I was there, people were pretty confident in this bet. They had just signed a huge deal with GSK, so it seemed to be going well. There wasn't widespread dissent at the time (~2016-2017). I imagine its different now that the stock price has crashed over 10x.

The company did follow Ancestry.com pretty closely. Ancestry did not bet heavily on genomics. Instead, they bet heavily on a subscription model and focused more on consumer interest in their ancestors. This has worked out a lot better for them than 23andMe.

FWIW, I agree it's obvious in retrospect that pharma was a bad bet. Leadership should have made better decisions.

I'm not really sure, probably far away. Most of the genomic analysis showed very weak correlations. I was more on software side of things.

As usual: “It depends’. Data on gene variants related to the first steps in drug metabolism can be quite useful both at home and clinically—e.g, your own responses to ethanol, caffeine, and many over-the-counter and prescribed drugs.

St Jude Children’s Research Hospital routinely genotypes/sequences children before drug treatments to optimize initial doses. It makes a huge difference in outcomes for most cancer patients.

But chronic age-related diseases that older individuals care about most are too complicated and too strongly affected by environmental factors to be well predicted by low coverage sequencing or genotyping platforms. Even deep sequencing and perfect telomere-to-telomere personal genome assemblies (still about a $10,000 to 20,000 effort) will not be sufficient. You really need the patient’s full history and deep omics data. Michael P Snyder and colleagues at Stanford are getting close to this type of “future preventive health care” with a focus on type 2 diabetes.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=michael+mo+stanford&so...

Polygenic risk scores based in simple GWAS results and additive genetic models are uninformative (or minimally useful) wrt clinical care for complex diseases—even those that have moderate heritability. There are simple way too many variables, too many undefined gene-by-environmental effects, and too many non-additive effects (epistasis). Polygenic risk scores typically account for less than 20% of variance in disease traits.

Coming around full circle though—-these platforms ARE useful for pharmacogenetic predictions of initial metabolic processing of drugs—- getting us closer to the right dose the first time.

And the SNP genotypes generated by 23andMe are also valuable predictors for a subset of variants that contribute to nearly monogenic disorders.

Yes but I was one of only a handful of people with this access. It was heavily audited. AFAIK no one ever used it inappropriately.

Just for some perspective from outside the US: I work at a bank in a country subject to GDPR. I have access to customer data, as do most people on my team.

The company was not very well run so I’m not surprised. Their stock price has tanked over 10x since IPO, and it dropped by half in the employee lockout period after IPO.

Software engineer