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Comment by usernametaken29 | Hacker News Reader

In genetics the end user is never the consumer. You have to collect blood, prepare it, sequence it. These are all highly specialised steps in which something will and can go wrong, and that’s why typically a hospital carries them out. That’s before even getting the device to do sequencing. The cheapest nanopore comes you at a couple ten thousand euros. Given the premise your work strikes me as oddly theoretical. Who is that mystery home DNA lab that needs decentralised private compute? Also, and funnily enough, for much of the genomic pipelines to run (eg a paternity test or a cancer test), a home computer is sufficient. Again, of course, you would need proper medical training to read, interpret and judge the results, which is why a hospital does it… so what problem exactly are you solving?

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There are many motivations for consumer genomics and they might pick up further.

https://vishakh.blog/2025/07/08/using-mpc-for-anonymous-and-...

If you look at a previous experiment we did, the costs for getting genotyped are pretty moderate (<$80) and going down further. Blended genome-exome (<$150) and full genome sequencing (<$500) are getting cheaper as well.

Through our Explorer product (https://explorer.monadicdna.com/) we let people glean information about their genome using GWAS Catalog data.

This PoC addresses the next step, i.e. how to keep genetic data private at the user level while still allowing aggregate studies to happen, with or without financial incentives.

https://www.the-odin.com/

$599 for 30x coverage sequencing of any whole genome: https://www.the-odin.com/whole-genome-sequencing-30x/

Or purchase the equipment you need to DIY.

That's a kit for sample collection. You would then ship off your sample to the company in question, and they would do the actual sequencing, and then send the DNA data and genetic variants they've inferred back to you. I think that defeats what the article author is trying to accomplish, since you still share your entire genome with a third party.

The actual instruments used by that company are a whole lot more expensive, and you have to buy reagents as well: https://www.machinio.com/illumina/dna-sequencers

We have shown that we can batch user samples and then send them anonymously to the lab. Users can then use an MPC protocol to securely fetch their data without losing anonymity.

We plan to roll out a product called Batcher which does this soon.

So essentially you’re telling people: “Don’t use the evil labs they can read your DNA, instead send DNA to our lab and with magic maths we won’t be able to read your DNA but diagnose you!”

Sounds about right to me

Not our lab. We simply aggregate the anonymous samples and then work with third party accredited labs.

I'm not sure I understand how that that would make a material difference. The company might not know who submitted each sample, but the company would still have their entire genomes in their possession. That is no different, than if somebody obtained the data from a biobank. The data in biobanks is normally also anonymized, insofar that you can anonymize whole-genome DNA data

The idea is to create an incentive or altruistic mechanism for people to contribute their data without losing anonymity and privacy.

This! And even if you could magically have a 1000$ sequencer at home, you still need to correctly extract the blood, and apply the kit. It sounds easy but really isn’t, this isn’t home baking but PCR, where it’s easy to mess up. You need to know when a result is a true positive and whether your sample is useful / correctly collected. Maybe an inspired bioinformatics citizen lab can do it, but it’s bizarre to think the average consumer would do it. It’s not as simple as taking a drop of blood beep boop result like it is for insulin tests and I don’t think it’ll be like that for a very long time to come.

Yes, I'm aware. I'm also aware that Oxford Nanopore now sells a $5,150 MinION pack containing the sequencer, five full flow cells, and a sequencing kit. Admittedly it's not targeted at whole human genomes, for which Oxford sells PromethION. But I'm not going to say it couldn't be done. And for much less than the [inflation adjusted] cost of my first computer. Even starting from an empty bench you're looking at $7 - $10k.

Have you used them? Interested myself

couldn't this argument could be made against a lot of scientific research? i bet it took a long time for the average consumer to benefit from the discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA.

and the government funds that kind of stuff even. so what's wrong with a private person doing it?

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