23andMe

23andMe
legal form	Incorporated
founding	April 2006
Seat	Sunnyvale , California
management	Anne Wojcicki , Andy Page, Esther Dyson , Patrick Chung
Number of employees	229 (2018)
Website	23andMe.com

23andMe is an American biotechnology company .

Companies

The company was founded in April 2006 by Linda Avey , Paul Cusenza and Anne Wojcicki . The venture capitalists include u. a. the Google Inc. , in 2007 3.9 million USD invested. Seven professors from various US universities sit on the scientific advisory board. Linda Avey left the company in 2009.

Business area

The company's name refers to a person's 23 pairs of chromosomes . From December 2007 it offered private individuals an examination of their genetic information. The offer was initially only aimed at customers from the USA, but was expanded to numerous other countries over time. It is available in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, among others. (As of January 2019) In several stages, the price was reduced from initially $ 999 to $ 99 plus shipping costs (as of January 2019). The company analyzed genes from over three million customers by February 2018.

The saliva sample sent in was examined for around 200 genetic diseases and 99 other predispositions. Information on the geographical origin is also provided. More than 960,000 segments of the human genome are examined, which identify single nucleotide polymorphisms and make up personal characteristics.

The health analysis was temporarily no longer offered because the FDA prohibited the company from doing so. Genetic lineage analyzes and raw DNA data continued to be made available. Health analyzes have been offered again since 2015.

In 2013, the company received the patent for a process that allows predictions to be made for a desired child.

The company conducts its own research. Customers can contribute to research by providing data from surveys and combining the genetic data with other personal data.

criticism

Of self-help groups has been criticism that the result is mediated only via the Internet and not personal. Data protectionists fear that information could reach employers and health insurance companies. Scientists also criticize the fact that the risk of certain diseases is not determined solely by genetic disposition, but also - often predominantly - by lifestyle (e.g. diet, exercise). However, 23andMe clearly indicates this for all results.

In June 2010, The Great Beyond blog of the scientific journal Nature reported that 23andMe had mixed up data or DNA samples from 96 customers.

In July 2013 a bug in the algorithms was found by a 23andMe customer; therefore a serious illness was diagnosed, but it was not found in the customer's DNA.

In June 2019, the competitor Ancestry.com in Germany received the negative BigBrotherAward in the newly created biotechnology category , “because it encourages people interested in family research to send in their saliva samples. Ancestry sells the genetic data to commercial pharmaceutical research, enables covert paternity tests and creates the data basis for police genetic screening. ”In his laudation, Thilo Weichert also criticized 23andMe as a“ genetic octopus ”:

“Ancestry refuses to provide customers with any information about the so-called research, methods, partners or conclusions that are drawn from it, as the 'owners of their data'. What is behind this becomes clear when you take a closer look at the young, up-and-coming industry of genetic data octopuses. Ancestry competitor 23andMe, for example, which has only half the size of the data, recently signed a cooperation agreement with the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline for the use of the data for USD 300 million. The business model of these providers is not genealogy, but rather big money with genetic data, with the pharmaceutical industry in particular as a buyer. "

- Laudation from Thilo Weichert at the BigBrotherAwards 2019

Competitor

The Icelandic company DeCODE Genetics has been acquired by Amgen . The competitor Navigenics was also sold to Life Technologies .

In the area of trading in genome data, EncrypGen, Luna DNA and Zenome are developing platforms that can be used to sell your own gene data without sequencing. Nebula offers the complete genome analysis as well as the sale of limited usage rights to its own genome data. The owner of the genome data remains the anonymous publisher of the genetic data - as the carrier of the genome. Tellmegen (Valencia, Spain) and 24Genetics (Madrid, Spain) are new competitors, and dante labs and Veritas offer full sequencing.