Last Friday 23andMe came up with Haplogroup Tree Mutation Mapper which is the first experimental feature that can be instantly tested by biogeek customers (a large portion of the company’s customer base) in its freshly launched technology sandbox 23andMe Labs that is much like Google Labs.
Haplogroup Tree Mutation Mapper “shows you which particular mutations in a person’s mitochondrial DNA (maternal ancestry) or Y chromosome (paternal ancestry) were used to determine their haplogroup assignment.”
Basically you are picking the Y chromosome or type the name of a maternal mitochondrial haplogroup (like T) into the search box and as a result you get a list back with the position and id-s of the defining mutations. With that information you can play different genetic genealogy games if you like.
But playing with a pure textual list of SNPs doesn’t sound too fascinating and the tool is not really a “Mapper” as there’s no visualization included. Wouldn’t it be nice if you can visualize all those haplogroup defining SNP positions at once and get extra biological information on them right away? Well, you cannot do that within the 23andMe website but you can do that with Mitowheel which is a graphical representation of the circular human mitochondrial genome (Disclaimer: I am part of developer team, see post and the Mitowheel blog).
For instance the SNPs on the left are parts of the T haplogroup defining mutations used by 23andMe. The rCRS is the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence, the rs<numbers> are the reference cluster IDs of SNPs. rCRS is a reconstruction of a single European individual’s mtDNA, the source was an unnamed placenta without further identity and it contains several rare alleles. I’ve also heard rumors that some blurry nucleotides were replaced by cow DNA. The rCRS nevertheless provides a uniform nucleotide numbering scheme (0-16569) even if the 3106 position is a phantom position (like chief evangelist) as there was an incorrect duplication of 3107C in the original sequence. So if you check the rCRS positions on the list, the one you should use in Mitowheel is +1 position away that you can see in parentheses if you click on the individual SNP rsids within the 23andMe site.
So here are all the positions 23andMe is using for T haplotyping and you can type them into the Mitowheel search box: 10463, 13368, 14905, 15607, 15928, 188, 4917, 709, 8697 and step through all of them by clicking the arrow in the search box and get a lot of extra information by checking the info popup box.
As a 23andMe customer you can instantly look for functional information on your particular SNPs with Mitowheel by adding the nucleotide letters of your specific mutation to the positions like in 8697A, so the following is the result of the search for all of my T defining SNPs: 10463C, 13368A, 14905A, 15607G, 15928A, 1888A, 4917G, 709A, 8697A
As Mitowheel incorporates data on fully sequenced human mitochondrial genomes that have been deposited in the GenBank database the allele frequencies of 23andMe customers can be checked at those positions and groups can be created based on Gábor Zsurka’s, Mitowheel founder, post. Read the rest of this entry »
In the past months Thomas Goetz begun writing a book on the radical changes already ongoing but mostly upcoming in healthcare due to affordable new technologies and quantitative approaches in personalized genomics and medicine.
The book is to be called The Decision Tree (explanation below) accompanied by a new website. Thomas is the perfect man for this job, he is the deputy editor of Wired magazine (=he is well informed and connected), a good journalist who took his job (writing on science, health and medicine) so seriously that he went back to school to get a degree in Public Health. Back in the days his very early coverage on 23andMe (actually published before the official launch of the service) was actually the only serious insight on 23andMe.
With this book Thomas will have a chance to become the Chris Anderson or Malcolm Gladwell of personalized medicine and public health.
“The premise is that we are at a new phase of health and medical care, where more decisions are being made by individuals on their own behalf, rather than by physicians, and that, furthermore, these decisions are being informed by new tools based on statistics, data, and predictions. This is a good thing – it will let us, the general public, live better, happier, and even longer lives. But it will require us to be stewards of our health in ways we may not be prepared for. We will act on the basis of risk factors and predictive scores, rather than on conventional wisdom and doctors recommendations. We will act in collaboration with others, drawing on collective experience with health and disease, rather than in the isolation and ignorance that can come with “privacy” concerns. And we will act early, well before symptoms appear, opting to tap the science of genomics and proteomics in order to mitigate our risks down the road.
Together, these tools will create a new opportunity and a new responsibility for people to act – to make health decisions well before they become patients. This can be characterized as a decision tree, a series of informed choices we will make to minimize uncertainty and optimize our outcomes. Indeed, we will use decision trees to navigate most of our health decisions, sometimes in overt ways – new decision support tools will both inform us and guide us, and they’ll be steeped in statistics, prediction, and the power of collective experience.”
and here we go….Happy Holidays Grandma you’got a 2fold risk for psoriasis but don’t worry too much about the Alcohol Flush Reaction and your caffeine consumption!
New 23andMe website animation on human prehistory made by Ariana Killoran. Ariana created all the Genetics 101 films for 23andMe and the narrator was her pa. With these films the company clearly sets a new standard in popular scientific animations and videos.
What do you think, which company launched the first commercial and comprehensive personal genome service (based on a genome-wide SNP scan) on the market and exactly when?
We have 2 candidates here in the ring deCODE Genetics (founded in 1996, Iceland) and 23andMe (founded in 2006, USA), the AmundsenandScott of personal genomics. (please don’t take the analogy too seriously)
The when is important from a historical point of view because that day will be considered as the birthday of this infant industry. The birth month and year is November 2007 for sure. That means we are just approaching the 1 year anniversary of the commercial personal genetics/genomics industry and this sounds like a good timing to think about the achievements so far and the future ahead.
But let’s figure out the exact date first and here I think we should consider the day on which a personal genome service was launched for the first time directly available to costumers and when the first public orders were taken.
I only read 1 piece so far by Erika Check Hayden, who has the exclusive freedom at Nature to always pick the best stories and write on any of them, but being a heavy 23andMe user I was instantly reminded again on the program Promethease with which I can extend the interpretation of my data with an approximately 2 hour run.
According to two commercial gene-testing services — 23andMe and deCODEme — US Army medic Timothy Richard Gall of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, has a higher-than-average risk of basal cell carcinoma, type 2 diabetes and psoriasis. But much more enlightening than these results, which cost Gall more than $1,400, was a free online program called Promethease that he used to further analyse the data. By offering more in-depth information and interpreting of more of his genetic variants, Promethease “gives a much more realistic view of the usefulness of the information”, Gall says.Start-ups and services such as Promethease are now developing ways to improve the limited value of information provided by personal genomics companies for consumers and scientists alike.
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: Read the rest of this entry »
Finally 23andMe, my first personal genetics service provider, is on Twitter which could mean that from now on first-hand company information will flow even more continuously compared to what the regularly/daily updated eminentcorporate blog can offer. Microblogging is always quicker blogging! Based on the first 4 tweets (on the photo) the guys will not just simply link to the posts but communicate with other Twitterers and give informal & brand new info.
I ordered my first commercial genetic profile from 23andMe on the 9th of September online, FedExed my 2 ml saliva from Budapest to 23andMe, Mountain View on the 12th of September. I got the results today. That said within 3 weeks since the birth of the idea I purchased more than 500 000 SNPs of mine analyzed, evaluated and ready to be browsed. With this step I finally and quickly entered into the age of personalized genetics no matter how embryonic it is.
After a superficial first scan of my results I can say that it is a really interesting thing that instantly pushes me towards accumulating more knowledge on the personalized genetics field concerning specific traits, stats, risks and studies.
Here is a first look on what my Y chromosome SNPs are saying on my paternal haplogroup:
I learned for instance that based only on my genotype and not any environmental factors involved I have a lower than average riskRead the rest of this entry »
It was already known that amongst the Google top people Sergey Brin is the one who is most interested in pushing biotechnology and the biomedical sciences: in his Stanford years he was interested in biology courses according to The Google Story, he married Anne Wojcicki (who graduted from biology at Yale), Google invested $4.4 million into 23andMe the pioneering personal genomics company co-founded by Anne, then Google invested into 23andMe competitor Navigenics too.
Now Sergey Brin added another, serious and personal reason to think that he is really, personally committed to the quick progress in the biomedical sciences: in his new blog – already a bit of an Internet history – called Too he disclosed that using the 23andMe personal genetics service he figured out something worrying about his and his family’s risk of Parkinson disease (his mother and her aunt are being already diagnosed with PD):
“I learned something very important to me — I carry the G2019S mutation and when my mother checked her account, she saw she carries it too. The exact implications of this are not entirely clear. Early studies tend to have small samples with various selection biases. Nonetheless it is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson’s in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20% to 80% depending on the study and how you measure.
The G2019S mutation is actually the rs34637584 SNP and lies in the gene LRRK2 encoding leucine-rich repeat kinase on chromosome 12. The mutation affects the first codon of the gene and is a guanine (G)-to- adenine (A) substitution resulting known as a missense and leads to a glycine – serine (hence the name) amino acid conversion in the protein product. Here is how the SNP position looks in the 23andMe browser using the sample family, the Mendels.
As the second operation of building my genetically well informed future yesterday (2 days after completing the order) I collected 2 ml of my saliva with the help of 23andMe’s Oragene DNA self-collection kit manufactured by DNA Genotek. First operation has been the sequencing of the D-loop of my mitochondrial DNA out of 5 ml of saliva in the lab at Tulane as a last control experiment, more on that later.
I’d be curious to know approximately how many people in Hungary or in Central Europe, or in all Europe have already used personalized genetics services like 23andMe or the Iceland based deCODE genetics’ genotyping services. As the whole industry is less than 1 year old (starting November 2007) there are not too many public stats available or at least I haven’t found any. With the recent (8th Sep) announcement of the modest $399 kit price reduced from $999 the pioneering personalized genetics service is now affordable for a lot more people, like me (compare it to the $600 iPhone early adopter fee, which I was unable not to buy). Read the rest of this entry »
BioBarCamp is due in circa 3 weeks and we have now 45 BioBarCampers signed up on the list of attendees and our host the Institute For The Future has the capacity for around 55 more campers, roughly for 100 people in general. We already have a very valuable mix: researchers, biologists (grad, postdoc, PI), coders-engineers-bioinformaticians, biotech entrepreneurs, doctors, science journalists.
Here is the list so far and that’s also a chance for you to decide whether you want to join and meet us there in Palo Alto on the 6th and 7th, August and share, ask and answer, be the donor and receptor of ideas from all around biogeekdom. I am continuously trying to collect some links on the campers on the BioBarCamp FriendFeed Room to make future Campers preconnected.
It’s my first real encounter with a situation in which the officials of the state of California are clearly against innovation for financial reasons obvious enough (is enough):
Wired.com has obtained a copy of the cease-and-desist letter sent to Navigenics by the state of California’s Public Health Department from a company spokesperson.
The letter’s strongest wording is reserved for another section of the law, Business and Professions Code Section 1288, which requires a doctor’s note for all laboratory tests, unless, like pregnancy tests, they are exempt from that law.
“Genetic tests are NOT exempt,” the letter reads. “As such, the test must be ordered by a physician or surgeon.”Read the rest of this entry »
It’s official: The California Department of Public Health wants practicing physicians (many of them prehistorically, sorry, traditionally trained) to be the patres familias in issues between personal genetic test takers and direct-to-consumer personal genetic testing start-ups while declining the test takers’ right to get familiar with their own genetic makeup and risks by their own. Calif. cracks down on 13 genetic testing startups
California health regulators have demanded that 13 direct-to-consumer genetic testing startups halt sales in the state until they prove they meet state standards. All the companies have two weeks to demonstrate to regulators that their laboratories are certified by the state and federal governments, said department spokeswoman Lea Brooks. The startups also must show the tests they are selling California residents have been ordered by a doctor as required by state law.
Also a good presentation by Linda Avey, other co-founder, for instance on data privacy and service security:“We take the security of our customers’ data to the highest degree…you guys (Googlers) are very much of the same mind..One of our leading engineers is probably the most paranoid man we’ve ever meet and he is the perfect guy for that.
Here are my screenshots on the genetic puzzle on the Google triumvirate presented by Anne Wojcicki:
Consumer-Enabled Research, the second goal of pioneering personalized genetics company 23andMe, reached its first generation with the launch of 23andWe.
“23andWe marks a new approach to genetics research. By directly involving 23andMe customers in the company’s research projects, the goal is to conduct large-scale studies powered by a web-based community of diverse individuals who are willing to share information (on a confidential basis) about their health and other personal traits.”
A good introduction in Nature on the risks and advantages of letting people know their genetic risk information via personal genetics services. I do hope that the test-takers will finally become the risk overtakers.
Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is a rapidly growing market — the past year has seen the launch of companies, such as Navigenics and 23andMe in California and DeCODEme in Iceland, that offer DNA screening for a range of common genetic variants linked to disease. The testing outfits have created a buzz in the business and research communities as well as in the wider public: Google has invested in two of them and Navigenics briefly opened a store in New York’s hip SoHo district.
“It’s an intriguing idea that you can peel back your genome and reveal your future.”
The idea is that test-takers will be alerted to risks and so take preventive action where possible. But psychosocial scientists who study how people respond to risk information say there is scant evidence that people are affected deeply by genetic test results, or that such tests spur much change in behaviour.Read the rest of this entry »
It seems that my favorite ever unconference, the SciFooCamp will be aroundunconferenced by a BioBarCamp this year. The whole idea of the BioBarCamp is based upon the SciFoo Camp, so it is by no means a competitive but a complimentary event.
From the BarCamp wiki: “The BioBarCamp is an idea (fed by the tweets of the BioTwitterer community) to organize a life sciences – biotechnology – personalized genomics & medicine – bioinformatics unconference at the Bay Area around the 3rd SciFoo Camp time, which is 8-10th August. The SciFooCamp generates a lot of enthusiasm & activity but not just for those who are invited (only 200). On the other hand, it would be nice to organize a bio-related BarCamp, just like the Cambridge BarCamb, in which the bio-related SciFoo Campers and all the other biogeeks could gather together.”
The main activity is happening right now at the public BioBarCamp Google Group. If interested please join there or just follow the discussions. We are right now in the process of finding a proper venue and sponsors and any help would be most welcome. Right now 6 or 7 August seems to be the consensus day and we have a very generous offer from The Institute for the Future via Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in Palo Alto (no response from 23andMe so far, see below).
It’s against a classic Twitter story, just like this before. You can reconstruct the whole conversation with Twitter Search Engine Tweet Scan by searching for terms SciFoo, BioBarCamp, SciBarCamp but here are my selected tweets:
Scene One, 04/10/08 How the idea was born on that day in reverse chronological order:
Scene Two 04/22/08 How the biospecificity and name was born alongside with a possible venue idea: Read the rest of this entry »
In 2007, Google made headlines when they invested $4.4 million in 23andMe, a genetic screening start-up company began by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and a business partner. But if you thought that was Google’s only interest in genetics and DNA, you’re wrong. Google has also been investing in a second DNA start-up called Navigenics, which for $2,500 and a small bit of saliva will provide you with genetic test results delivered securely online containing information about the likelihood for 18 medical conditions.
What’s really funny here is that I predicted this investment last Friday, on the 18th, on Twitter. The original idea was Aaron Swartz’s Google thought experiment: Imagine you were suddenly put in charge of Google. What would you spend your time doing?I came up with this answer (picking Navigenics because of ther profile and location) on behalf of Sergey Brin:
“tracks the web technology ecosystem commonly referenced as “Web 2.0.” We collect facts and figures about new web products, startup companies, key startup employees, and the funding dollars powering their growth.”
3. 23andMe is a pioneering web-based, personalized genomics startup (founded in April, 2006) with a high-tech service, a definitely “Web 2.0″ website & investors most Web 2.0 startups only dreaming of.
The title question is my million (not billion yet) dollar question for this year. Arthur Levinson is a board member of Google (Apple too) and in his leftover time he is the CEO of the most successful biotech company so far, that’s Genentech. I would be curious to hear about his biotech-related activity as a G board member from my readers even in the form of guesses. Maybe he is teaching biotech classes to Googlers after both Genentech’s and Google’s investment into 23andMe or just sitting around sometimes at the nice cafeterias at the Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View and explaining knockout technology to coders.
To learn more, researchers need to collect thousands of genetic profiles – and the health data connected with each of them – to find correlations between the two. That leads to a second goal of 23andMe – to collect a large database of genetic information and then come back to you over time with invitations to provide specific health data and participate in research.
We’re not asking you to do this for purely altruistic reasons – either on our part or on yours. We’re a profit-seeking company, even though our founders and employees – and directors! – all share the vision of better understanding of everyone’s genomic make-up. As for you, the research results your data help produce could translate directly into benefits for you, or at least for your children, grandchildren and friends.
Now imagine a world (2009?) in which 23andMe genotype profiles could be uploaded to your Google Health profile with one click (see picture).
The personal genomics service 23andMe just launched publicly a corporate blog called The Spittoon that has been internally up for a few weeks. It is a new chapter in biotech corporate blogging. Just like the web page of 23andMe, The Spittoon’s WordPress blog platform, the concept and design is excellent: amongst others you can find scientific blog posts written by Matt Crenson science writer and posts written by founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki in the name of radical transparency. As Wired fellow Clive Thompson wrote:
Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups – and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right – and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he’s accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak.
Radical transparency could be standard in the case of Silicon Valley tech startups but in the Biotech Industry the standards are light years away from that. For instance the 23andMe research team communicates publicly on the biparental inheritance of mitochondrial DNA which is a sensitive issue concerning their genealogy service. The reason why Spittoon is so web-friendly and uptodate and is in fact a paradigm corporate blog for every other biotech company in the future is its web-based business model and Google-like corporate culture thanks to its networking background.
For instance, Anne Wojcicki co-founder introduces the concept of Consumer Enabled Research in her introductory blog post The Power of We:
Our goal at 23andMe is to enable individuals to form communities around shared interests and to empower those communities to be actively involved with research. We call it Consumer Enabled Research. We don’t just want communities to have a voice, we want to provide a platform for them to collectively aggregate their genetic information. One of the significant bottlenecks in research is the lack of data. Researchers and physicians rarely have enough of it to really understand a disease or how to treat it. Our goal is to change that.
After registration readers can make comments and I strongly hope that the comment system will not be shut down (just like in the past at BoingBoing), but for that commenters should be on-topic and moderate. I’ve just commented Wojcicki’s post, but I’d like to share it with you here too: Read the rest of this entry »
In my former blog post inF.A.Q. for 23andMe: what if I have mitochondrial DNA from Pa? I meditated on 23andMe’s capability of detecting paternal mitochondrial DNA in their customers’ saliva with their Illumina microarray chips scanning around 2000 mitochondrial single nucleotide variants. Published here the initial answer of the 23andMe Editorial Team to this fairly technical, but nevertheless crucial question with permission granted. Besides, I am happy to report that I am working on a blogterview with one of the key member of 23andMe’s Research Team. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to you with some first-hand information on the science and technology behind the personal genome service of 23andMe and on how 23andMe can facilitate academic research.
Dear Attila Csordas,
Thank you for your interest in 23andMe’s research mission. The question of paternal inheritance of mtDNA is a fascinating one, and the debate in the literature has continued over the past couple of decades. Currently, there is little evidence for paternal inheritance of mtDNA, outside of isolated individuals. However, the array platform lets us resolve multiple SNP states independently. 23andMe’s technology and throughput may indeed provide a novel way to address the question. We will include the question in our consideration of research projects. In the meantime, here are a couple of articles discussing the subject:
The question is crucial for a personalized genetics company like 23andMe providing Maternal Ancestry Tree service for the customers based on the exclusively maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA. As one of my correspondent partner wrote: Read the rest of this entry »
Have you ever asked any important but infrequently asked questions? Have you ever heard about the first personal genome service by the biotech startup 23andMe? Here is an inF.A.Q. addressed to this company:
According to the cool 23andMe genetics educator:
According to the peer review literature this is not necessarily the case and sometimes (rarely I admit) things in your cells can happen otherwise or more scientifically (mitochondrial recombination can occur):
When 23andMe’s Maternal Ancestry Tree service is tracing the genetic path of their customers, the microarray employees are identifying their haplotypes based on the differences in the mitochondrial DNA. The company is using SNPs (single nucleotide variants) unusually both from genes in the compact mitochondrial coding region (around 15.5kb) as well as within the circa 1kb large hypervariable region to give a detailed ancestry assignment. 23andMe examines few thousand places (over 2000 says Mr. Bettinger) on the mitochondrial DNA out of the total 600,000 SNPs.
But.
In the above case the 28 year old man’s blood and muscle differed at 18 positions which allowed assignment of the two sequences to separate European mtDNA haplogroups, H and U5, former being the same as the mother’s haplotype, while the haplotype of the patient’s muscle mtDNA was identical to that of his father’s and uncle’s blood. I wonder whether 23andMe’s Illumina chips can help make things clear in cases like this. (solution: let’s sequence the whole mito genome instead of a couple thousand basepairs). So as the first step in my mission to support the mission of 23andMe to support the mission of academic research I’d like to suggest putting a short tail on the possibility of paternally inherited mtDNA in the cool 23andMe genetics education material. Read the rest of this entry »
Wow, what an all web experience it was: Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki co-founderspresenting their slides on the just launched personal genome service of their company 23andMe, then answering questions. The whole webcast will be available later on their website.
Here is a very short account of their webcast based on my texting and ears: Of course, they are planning to launch a blog later, they are in close contact with F.D.A. people to get things right, the genetic data on the 23andMe are belonging to customers, Google Health connection: not any right now, but open to work with anybody to empower individuals’ advance research, consumers are parts of the research process via answering surveys (so this is not really user-generated content in a Wikipedian way).
Some of my questions were connected to 23andMe’s mission to support academic research, a mission I wanted to put to the test:
- Do they plan to launch PhD programs and setting up a wholly functional research lab? Answer: a little laugh after this question and Linda Avey said something like that “oh, no, maybe later, who knows?”.
- Do they plan to organise research conferences to support research? Answer: “It’s something that we have and plan.”
My third accepted question (with a terrible English) was (the unaccepted ones were of course more intertesting.
Elrond: Strangers from distant lands, friends of old you have been summoned here to answer the threat of Mordor. Middle Earth stands upon the brink of destruction, none can escape it. You will unite or you will fall. Each race is bound to this fate, this one doom. Bring forth the ring, Frodo.
[Frodo puts the ring on a stand for all to see] Boromir: So it is true. In a dream, I saw the Eastern sky grow dark. But in the West, a pale light lingered. A voice was crying, “The doom is near at hand, Isildur’s Bane is found.”
[Reaches for the Ring] Boromir: Isildur’s Bane… Aragorn: Boromir! Gandalf: speaking the words engraved on the Ring] Ash Nazg Durbatuluk, Ash Nazg Gimbatul, Ash Nazg Thrakatuluk, Agh Burzum-ishi Krimpatul.
[the light darkens and the air rumbles; Boromir backs away from the Ring]
Let us form the first real alliance of BT folks and IT people through personalized genomics (and later with regenerative medicine as I hope so), but take care, biologists and geneticists have way too powerful tools and web entrepreneurs are greedily looking for new territory with their unconceivable computational and storage capacity and perpetual hunger! Go, go, push, push! (Of course, there is no such thing as an outside threat of Mordor in this situation, the real threat (the other side of the reward coin) as in every revolutionary case is the shared ambition of tech people to make formerly impossible things possible).
Some analysts predict that the genetic-testing market 23andMe is entering could be worth a staggering $12.5 billion by 2009. Naturally, this has attracted the interest of Web entrepreneurs. They see an industry that is largely unregulated (so far) and costs only a few million dollars to enter—the price of a few brilliant programmers, a website, and marketing—and are betting that people will pay to test their own DNA directly. One indication of the potential market is that online medical-information companies are starting to make real profits. WebMD, for instance, attracts 40 million users a month and expects to net more than $30 million this year, mostly from ad sales. “I’m convinced there is an early-adopter market here,” says Sue Siegel, former president of Affymetrix and now a venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow. “Millions of people are used to getting health-care information online.” Read the rest of this entry »
“We are all from the same seed” – Kara Swisher summarizes what she heard from Linda Avey, co-founder of web based personal genome service 23andMe in the video interview below. Linda and the other founder Anne Wojcicki just talked about the company’s ancestry, genetic comparison and similarity seeking services, the ones that will technologically turned into a social networking service later based on shared genotypes backed by the genetical connectedness of all people (in this case all 23andMe customers). I called this idea the social networking XY.0 yesterday.
Linda’s thought was the following: “If genetics has the basis to bring people together, rather than differentiate them, that’s gonna be really interesting.” (Thanks Deepak for finding the videos)
In a recent Nature report by talented journalist Erika Check Hayden called So similar, yet so different we can find the following expert opinions on the very same topic that is commercialized and envisioned now by 23andMe (citing lengthy here, emphasis by me): In his 2000 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton chose to emphasize something he had recently heard from a genome researcher: that humans are all, irrespective of race, 99.9% the same genetically. “Modern science,” he told his country’s legislators, “has confirmed what ancient faiths have always taught: the most important fact of life is our common humanity.” Seven years on, and four years after the final publication of the sequences from the Human Genome Project, new technologies and larger data sets are allowing genome biologists to answer a conundrum embodied in that unity-inspiring percentage: if our DNA is so similar, why do we seem different in so many ways? Read the rest of this entry »
In these days, tech companies with MISSIONS are flourishing. I guess you’ve already heard about the company, whose mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The newly launched, Mountain View based 23andMe seems similar in the mission respect. 23andMe is the first (already successful) and web (or rather Google) – based biotech company offering personalized genome service to its customers including interpreted and highly probabilistic information on the health risks of the customer’s genetic profile. But 23andMe has much more to offer in these early days and I think that mainly the biggest mission behind the company will be to show how different people are irreversibly connected and similar through their genetic material and variants. The company’s Global Similarity Map based on the comparison of the evaluated SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) variants amongst customers and the Ancestry Service based on the by and large maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA. They will make this mission more explicit by introducing a social networking service around shared genotypes or as it claimed in the Wired article on 23andMe:
This is also where a novel use of social-networking tools comes in. Wojcicki envisions groups of customers coming together around shared genotypes and SNPs, comparing notes about their conditions or backgrounds and identifying areas for further scientific research on their own. “It’s a great way for individuals to be involved in the research world,” Wojcicki says. “You’ll have a profile, and something almost like a ribbon marking participation in these different research papers. It’ll be like, How many Nature articles have you been part of?’” (Social networking will be included in version 2.0 in a matter of months, Avey says.)
The idea of social networking based on genetic similarities and vulnerabilities: this is social networking XY.0 and the challenge Read the rest of this entry »
After Jobs-Wozniak, Yang-Filo, Brin-Page, it’s time to memorize the names of the co-founders of 23andMe, the first personalized genome service, who are turning the tech establishment into a biotech mode.
The new faces of Silicon Valley: the age of Blue Jeans/Black T-Shirt co-founder computer nerds is over, welcome to the era of stylish, well-dressed genetics-savvy co-founder business ladies! According to the about page of 23andMe:
Linda Avey has over 20 years of sales and business development experience in the biopharmaceutical industry while the other founder, Anne Wojcicki brings to 23andMe a 10-year background in healthcare investing, focused primarily on biotechnology companies.
23andMe is probably the most well-connected startup in the history of Silicon Valley with an unlimited amount of networking and server capabilities thanks to Wojcicki and board member Esther Dyson.
After all, what customers can really expect of personal genome services that companies like 23andMe can offer beyond knowing whether they have a perfect pitch or not? If the service can really help in minimizing the risk of life threatening diseases, than the real expectation is to live longer by using those personalized/commercialized genome data. The future will answer this question, but it seems pretty sure that robust life extension (more than, say 100 extra productive and healthy years) is not within range just by knowing your predisposed genetic makeup in details. At the present moment the life extension bonus effect for using those services cold be around a decade and this guess is coming from Thomas Goetz’s article in Wired on 23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics:
And, yes, we will know whether our children are predisposed to certain traits or talents — athletics or music or languages — and encourage them to pursue certain paths. In short, life will become a little more like a game of strategy, where we’re always playing the percentages, trying to optimize our outcomes. “These are enormously large calculations,” says Leroy Hood, a pioneer of genomic sequencing and cofounder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, who suggests that if we pay attention and get the math right, “it’s not a stretch to say that we could increase our productive lifespans by at least a decade.”
Last Friday 23andMe came up with Haplogroup Tree Mutation Mapper which is the first experimental feature that can be instantly tested by biogeek customers (a large portion of the company’s customer base) in its freshly launched technology sandbox 23andMe Labs that is much like Google Labs.
Wow, what an all web experience it was: Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki 
Affymetrix
