The terms of service stipulate that they won't give out info. But if you release it to someone, it's on you. My rationale was/is: knowledge is better than ignorance, and worth the risk.
i did this. interesting stuff indeed. above average risks for prostate and colorectal cancer. it's 199 - $50 off ..but if you wait around you can get it for 99.
Why do they require the subscription? I don't want to pay $9/month for something I don't need. I'm adopted and don't know much about my birth parents, so this could be really useful for me for medical risks and stuff.
The subscription is used to see how new discoveries apply to your genes. And to match new members to you for the family portion of the service.
did you find that the service was worth it? i mean, it's dna testing, so it seems relatievly cheap, but i am curious as to whether people see it as legit. i don't know anything about my paternal side, and it would be cool to know where my ancestors are from, any genetic medical issues, etc. waiting until the price is not $299 though...
I bought it back in the day for $99. This was when there was no subscription service. They started using a new "chip", though, so I often get an email saying "new results" but logging in yields a message saying I have to pay for a new test and subscription to learn the results. Biggest reason to do it - the ancestry stuff. Pretty neat. Second biggest - if you can get parents and family to do it together you'll get some better results, I think. You get to share info and learn more traits. 23andMe de-emphasized the part where you answer questions and help build a data based model of genetics, which makes me sad personally. Last point - Air Langhi is right - if you're not "European", you're going to get a lot of results that do not really apply. But... that's what your data can ultimately help with, if you're okay with it.
I watched some show about genetics that showed how different companies that do this can take the same person's DNA and come up with wildly different results. Like one will say you are a high risk for something and the other will say you aren't or the test was inconclusive. I don't know enough about the stuff to comment one way or the other. I'm still considering doing it, though... even though I think Google backs these guys and probably wants to own all of humanity in the next 20 years.
One of the founders is married to Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google... and he put some initial money in. I think Google Ventures, a VC firm funded by Google money, was in their early funding rounds as well, yes.
Yeah, it's cool. I found that I'm 100% euro, not 'a tiny bit Cherokee' like every cracker says. The relative finder is neat. The health risk stuff seems fairly accurate based on what I know of my family history (speaking of that, I need to check for acid reflux stuff). Friend me gais! But only if we're related.
So I have finally done it. Curious - of those who have done it, how much Neanderthal DNA do you have? Apparently I am in the 99th percentile .
Looked at the 23andme Facebook page, and they have a post saying "How much Neanderthal DNA do you have?" Thought these two responses were funny:
In a reddit post today, a redditor revealed that they recently signed up for 23andme along with their sister and brother. The results came back and it turned out that the brother was only a half brother. Whoops. Oh, and the original topic of the thread: In Big Shift, 23andMe Will Invent Drugs Using Customer Data 23andMe, the Google GOOGL +1%-backed personal genetics startup, will no longer just sell tests to consumers, or genetic data to pharmaceutical companies. This morning, it announced that it plans to start inventing medicines itself. It’s not just talk. The company has hired Richard Scheller, who led drug discovery at biotech icon Genentech for 14 years before announcing he would retire in December, and who has won some of science’s top awards, including the Lasker Prize, often referred to as “America’s Nobel,” and the Kavli Prize. “I wanted a new challenge, I wanted a new area of science to learn more about, I wanted to see if we could really take advantage of the full potential of the human genome and thought that this is the best place to do that,” Scheller says. He will start next month with the title of Chief Scientific Officer and head of therapeutics, and could eventually have a staff of dozens. The move is a big one for 23andMe, because it will allow it to capture a much greater proportion of the economic value its genetic databases could create. Consider this: doubling the 800,000 genetic test kits it has sold to date would bring in $79 million. Sources have told me that a recent collaboration with Genentech, which is now a unit of Roche, on Parkinson’s research could generate $60 million in total. But a medicine in clinical trials can easily be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a marketed drug can be worth billions. Especially coming just days after Apple AAPL +1.78%’s announcement (no, not the watch) that it was introducing an open-source toolkit, called ResearchKit, for using the iPhone to run medical studies, the move seems like something more, too. It seems that it has finally hit home for Silicon Valley’s would-be revolutionaries that medicine is most likely to be changed from the inside, by co-opting existing processes for developing treatments and conducting clinical research. Apple’s ResearchKit is taken straight from 23andMe’s playbook, creating a way for consumers, who are paying for the privilege, to volunteer for research and self-report data for studies – except now they can do it on their phones. Parkinson’s, which became a key area for 23andMe after the company partnered with the Michael J. Fox Foundation, will also be one of Apple’s first forays into medicine. The Fox Foundation helped 23andMe sign up 12,000 patient volunteers, and it is a key area for Apple, too, with an app called mPower. Already, 6,000 volunteers have signed up for that app. “What’s unique about this is anybody who has an iPhone has the ability to download this and to participate,” Todd Sherer, the chief executive of the Fox Foundation, says of the Apple project. “It’s breaking down a barrier to getting people involved in research and to getting more consistent data over time.” Those are problems that have bedeviled medical researchers – and drug companies – for years. Working with Sage BioNetworks, a group that has been trying to convince drug companies to share their data, Apple designed new ways to get informed consent form patients over a phone app. And then there are problems of measurement. Parkinson’s patients are evaluated subjectively by doctors during office visits, but what if you could measure a patient’s walk in real time with a phone’s accelerometer, or even detect Parkinson’s in his voice? Heart failure patients are evaluated based on how far they can walk in six minutes. What if an iPhone app can measure how much they move? What is different here from previous attempts at digital health – and similar to 23andMe’s move into pharma – is that this is an “if you can’t beat them, join them,” strategy. It recognizes that the way into medical practice is by conducting studies, not simply building a new solution. “Apple has correctly surmised that the way to be part of the life sciences ecosystem is not to think only about the commercial aspect, but also about the research aspect, too,” says Glen de Vries, the president of Medidata Solutions MDSO +3.39%, a company that develops technology for clinical trials. Originally, 23andMe seemed very much a part of a Silicon Valley view of healthcare in which the system could be overwhelmed by popular demand and new ideas about how to do things. The company sold its tests directly to consumers, and seemed to expect that it would be able to simply overcome legal obstacles to its business through simple PR. That ended in a huge setback in 2013 when the Food and Drug Administration told it that it could no longer give patients health information after they completed its genetic tests. (A recent FDA approval for tests for one type of genetic condition could provide a path forward.) But 23andMe had built a large enough database for its genetic information to be extremely valuable to Big Pharma, including Genentech and Pfizer. And those companies may actually be even more excited to get the company as competition. “I’m going to have a partner that understands my business,” says Jose-Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos, a group vice president at Pfizer. “In the past, you could tell that we had different business models. I see it as a win for us.” Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe’s founder, says that she always knew it was a possibility that the company might want to invent drugs itself. In a 2007 meeting, legendary Genentech chief executive Arthur Levinson, now the CEO of Google’s Calico drug discovery unit, predicted to her that eventually she’d tire of handing genetic information to pharma and would want to develop it herself. She says she thinks that’s what 23andMe’s customers would want. “People want to see a cure,” she says. “And cures don’t magically appear. Cures come from pharma, and biotech. And so part of what I think we can do is by making sure that the consumer really is at the forefront, that they are informed, that they know what’s going on, I’m hoping that they can really do a meaningful service for them by helping to develop those types of therapies.” Doing so will probably require that the company raise more money from investors, she and Scheller say. Customer’s at 23andMe can opt out of research on their data. The researchers working with Apple, too, believe that that company’s new research tools can change the way medical science advances, making patients more involved. “Imagine a world where you have studies for patients, by patients, where the person with the disease is on equal footing with the researcher,” says Stephen H. Friend, director and founder of Sage Bioscience. These ideas may be just Silicon Valley utopianism. No business is as good as drug development at humbling outsize ambitions. It could be that neither 23andMe’s new drug discovery unit nor Apple’s new research tools ever lead to a single advance. Or it could be that, when the history of the drug business is written, this will be remembered as the week when Silicon Valley finally got real.
