Posted on behalf of Brendan Maher:
News media have been trying to keep up with the dizzying pace of releases from companies going public about personal genomics. Navigenics and deCODE have been touting their plans to launch health based genetic testing services to anyone who wants them. Today, 23andMe made good on its promise to launch, going live with a service designed to genotype you for $999, store your data on its servers and allow you to query your genes for disease risks, ancestry, and inheritance. You can even, they say, opt into research studies and surveys and at some point connect socially with individuals who share your genetic proclivities or interests. This brave new world in do it yourself genomics is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (subscription required).
One early adopter of 23and Me, Amy Harmon of the New York Times, writes of her experiences in a light essay on determinism (free, but login required) in which she talks about how she “breezed through the warning screens,” so eager to see the stories her genes might tell her. Her colleague Nicolas Wade was a bit more measured, allowing some experts to urge a few words of caution.
When asked at a webcast this afternoon how they responded to criticisms that simple family history would provide a better predictor for most diseases, founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki said they agree, but that the community can’t learn more about genetic predisposition without more studies like the ones they hope to participate in. When asked whether they would be selling data to drug companies or other research entities that might want to capitalize on a strong genotype database, they reemphasized that they protect individual genotypes, but also that they knew the value of the aggregate data they’d be collecting. They would be looking into partnerships in which aggregate data could be accessed. That’s a long way of saying ‘we hope so.’ Nevertheless, they don’t collect any phenotype data up front – unless you consider credit card information a phenotype.
Coverage in the blogosphere has been attentive. Blaine Bettinger at the Genetic Genealogist has been covering the runup to the launch extensively. Over at All Things Digital, Kara provides more than most do about the personal relations between 23andMe founders and the top brass at Google. (Today, Avey and Wojcicki were asked if speculations about them partnering with Google Health were true (see our report here, subscription required) – there are no plans as of yet, but as Genentech and Google are major investors, there’s definitely an open door.)
Meanwhile, Matt Mealiffe calls out the current crop of personalized genomics efforts for not addressing structural genomic variation such as copy number, on which a number of papers have recently harped.
Image: Getty