Golden day for 23andMe: Time’s 2008 Invention of the Year
Posted by attilachordash on October 30, 2008
This is a golden day for 23andMe despite all crisis worries:
Mountain View, CA (PRWEB) October 30, 2008 — TIME Magazine announced today that the Personal Genome Service™ from 23andMe, Inc. has been named 2008’s Invention of the Year. 23andMe was chosen as the year’s most significant invention for its exceptional work in making personal genomics accessible and affordable.
From the industrial point of view what are the components of success here besides the obviously good team:
- mission: big, Google-sized mission: revolution of health care by personal genetic information as the source of upcoming personalized medicine
- biotechnology: based on the highest available technology platforms in microarrays (Illumina) (watch out, next gen sequencing is in the corner!)
- capital investment and network effect: I can only repeat myself: 23andMe is probably the most well-connected and backed startup in the history of Silicon Valley.(photo: happy 23andMe founders and early customers)
- information technology the cool and user-friendly factor of the browser based service is really amazing (in the past couple of weeks I demonstrated it to a bunch of people and even those were able to catch the essence of the available information who are older, web-unsavvy)
- simplicity of service: you just spit 2ml into a tube and FedEx it
- most aggressive marketing strategy based largely on the network effect among the power elite of the USA (and consequently, the world)
From the consumer point of view let me tell you 1 personal example of the lifestyle effect of the service: I am a coffee person who drinks usually 2 cups of coffee/day with a lot of milk and 1 coffee spoon of sugar. According to 23andMe I’m a fast caffeine metabolizer and lactase persistent/lactose tolerant which roughly means that I am cool with my current coffee drinking habit concerning the amounts of coffee and milk. Being a fast caffeine metabolizer suggests that drinking coffee probably doesn’t increase my heart attack risk although this is only a preliminary result that needs to be confirmed on larger statistical samples. Being lactose tolerant suggests that I probably don’t have to bother with the amount of milk in my coffee although I may still be lactose intolerant for other reasons which does not seem to be the case. But there’s 1 more component, the sugar and here it turns out that I have a bigger than average genotype specific risk for Diabetes Type 2 which is a serious business. So in this case my personal genotyping results confirm my everyday life practice and pushes me toward consuming even less sugar. Ever since I know this result I’m drinking coffee with only half spoon of sugar and also started to exercise daily.
Jim H said
But you didn’t need genotyping to tell you that exercising will lead to life extension, right? 2 cups of coffee per day isn’t too much, I think. I wouldn’t worry so much about a full or half teaspoon full of sugar as I would with gross daily consumption of sucrose & high fructose corn syrup.