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Comment by OutOfHere | Hacker News Reader

The tech behind 23andMe has long been grossly obsolete. AFAIK, they test a small sample of DNA only, whereas serious people do whole genome testing. A newer company in the field with more to offer is Nucleus Genomics, but I advise finding the full genome test provider that's right for you.

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They decided to try to be a pharma company instead of a diagnostics company. The microarray tech was obsolete, but they did have a lot of data. The problem is that being a pharmaceutical company is very difficult. I always question why they wanted to play in early pipeline rather than using their data to have an edge in later stage acquisitions. Perhaps they felt that running later stages of development and commercialization was too difficult, risky, and capital intensive; but if so then they probably had no business trying to sell drugs in the first place.

Isn't the real prize the library of personally-identified samples preserved in their "biobank" and not the methodologies or analysis they've applied to it so far...

The prize to the user is the quality of the data and the analysis, not the prospect of it.

And then what? So you find a full genome test provider, and now you have a full array result: What do you then do with it that doesn't violate your privacy?

I rarely used the 23andme website for much of anything and always used it to export into Promethease.

The 23andMe scan just doesn't have all the necessary data. It scans just a small sample of the data that's biologically relevant. Think 700K SNPs versus 5 million SNPs with full genome.

They have the freezers filled with biological material that could be resequenced though. Or not?

How is that useful to the user right now? Other companies have the full genome data sequenced, also offering a mature full genome sequencing service. 23andMe has neither.

It is like saying that AMD could train LLMs on its hardware. Maybe it could, but others already have it.

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