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23andMe Wins a Second Life, Raises $115M
- windsurfer 11y agoIs the link broken? The site keeps redirecting to http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/ http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- arm 11y agoSee this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384595
- ececconi 11y agoI was so excited when 23andMe dropped their prices to $99 a few years ago and immediately gave myself a 'Christmas Present' and bought a 23andMe kit. I seriously thought this was the future. I was so excited to see my health information. It was really cool to see that my spit could confirm that I'm 1/2 asian and 1/2 european. Also, I found it interesting that I have more neanderthal DNA than 99% of people who took the 23andMe test. Other than that, all the things I've seen are marginally useful at best. I log into my account once a year or so when I get an email from 23andMe. I understand these things take a lot of time, but I think a lot of the initial users aren't so ready to tell everyone that they need to sign up for a testing kit. I think people were so much more interested in it years ago.
- mmanfrin 11y agoOther than that, all the things I've seen are marginally useful at best. Part of it is that the FDA successfully sued 23AM from showing things like health risks.
- ececconi 11y agoI still see the health risks, like to heart disease, cancer, etc. Might be because I'm grandfathered in?
- toomuchtodo 11y agoCorrect.
- dragonwriter 11y agoYes, the restriction is on marketing products to diagnose, treat, etc. Once you've bought the product, the FDA doesn't prohibit the seller from continuing to provide service (and, to the extent that they contracted to provide the service, stopping providing the service could leave them liable to the purchaser.)
- disantlor 11y agoYou can always export your raw data from 23andMe and plug it into third party (and I guess foreign) services that will give you some health info. Of course you should probably approach the results with some skepticism. I know someone who found out she had a gene that causes an early and very aggressive cancer and now can take pre-emptive measures that quite likely will save her life.
- davorb 11y ago> I know someone who found out she had a gene that causes an early and very aggressive cancer and now can take pre-emptive measures that quite likely will save her life. Do you mind if I ask what service she used for this?
- duked 11y agoNot sure what the poster above used but I personally was faced with the same issue. I got my raw data from 23me and used https://www.promethease.com/ https://www.promethease.com/. I think you can do it for free yourself with the desktop version http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Promethease/Desktop http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Promethease/Desktop but it takes longer anyway I found some useful information from it but it's to be take with a grain of salt
- ap22213 11y agoIf you haven't already, check out http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/SNPedia http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/SNPedia. It's kind of cool to cross reference your SNPs to NIH studies.
- smokey_the_bear 11y agoI enjoyed my 23&me account in general. The one piece of info that I've found 'useful' was my eyecolor genotype. I have brown eyes and my husband has blue eyes. But I have blue and brown alleles, so before we had kids we were able to intelligently guess about their eye color. (It wasn't that useful, but we enjoyed it. We now have one child with blue eyes, and one with brown eyes)
- desireco42 11y agoSame here, we were super enthusiastic over their service. On top of it, some of the 'signals' they gave us are clearly wrong information. So, nothing. We did pay a little more for our tests, but I am not sorry for it, I just wished it worked better.
- kozak 11y agoI would be happy to have my DNA analyzed by them for whatever price, but I can't do that because I appear to live in a "wrong" country.
- allsystemsgo 11y agoThis would make me anxious. I remember reading about someone who learned from 23andMe that they had a terminal disease or something like that, and it drastically altered their life. I'd rather just live in ignorance.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago23andme user here (one of the first). If the disease in question could be hard to handle mentally/emotionally, they specifically include a warning that is very direct and says "Are you sure you want to know this?".
- hueving 11y agoThat's basically telling them with ambiguity attached. I'm not sure it's much better.
- alextgordon 11y agoThey should do a product that only tests for preventable, curable conditions. Telling someone they have a high risk of breast cancer or bowel cancer is helpful: they can get regular checkups. Telling someone they have a high risk of Parkinson's or MS is just cruel.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI'm not sure how that well that's going to work, with genome sequencing now below $1000. The data is going to be out there, putting your head in the sand isn't going to solve your mortality issues.
- RobAtticus 11y agoIt shows that message regardless of whether you have an increased risk or not. The presence of the message is not an indicator either way, so if you'd rather not know you simply ignore it.
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- tashoecraft 11y agoMy brother-in-law's brother learned of a 28year old daughter he never knew he had because of 23andMe and met her last year.
- irremediable 11y agoHow did that happen?
- tashoecraft 11y agobrother-in-law was signed up and he got a message saying his niece was on the service. He doesn't have any nieces. They chatted and he figured it must have been his brother and it was. Pretty crazy.
- throwaway_xgqtr 11y agoI'm sorry, could you explain in a bit more detail? It sounds like what you're saying is that your sister's husband signed up for 23andMe and sent in his DNA sample. Then, 23andMe said "based on your DNA, we believe another of our members is likely your niece, here is her contact info...". Then, your sister's husband contacted this person (the potential niece), and after some chatting it seemed likely that your sister's husband's brother was indeed the girl's biological father, and this was then later confirmed with additional DNA testing. If this is in fact the story, doesn't this seem like an invasion of privacy on the part of 23andMe?
- Karunamon 11y agoInvasion of privacy? Considering that you can't even get the health information now, ancestry matching is literally the only reason to use the service. Why would you sign up and go through the whole spitting in a cup song and dance if you didn't want to find relatives?
- throwaway_xgqtr 11y ago
- merpnderp 11y agoWhat happens if they go bankrupt? Will they sell off everyone's DNA and personal info like any other company?
- amelius 11y agoI don't like this sentence from the wikipedia page [1]: > The price of the full direct to consumer testing service in the United States has reduced from $999 in 2007 to $99 in 2012, and it is effectively being sold as a loss leader in order to build a valuable customer database. First, why can't companies these days just sell me a product for the cost price plus a margin? This seems like a fair way of doing business. Second, what do they want to do with my data? Why do they think it is valuable (will they sell it)? Why can't I just get my data without them keeping a copy of it? (It isn't because they offer an online comparison/discovery tool, since they could easily offer that as a downloadable app, so they don't need my data on their servers; it also isn't because they need to do research on the data, i.e., to find correlations, because they could make that voluntary). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23andMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23andMe
- 2bitencryption 11y agoYou misunderstand. The point is that the more data they have, the more valuable and "accurate" their analysis is -- it's like crowdsourcing genetics by building one large database. So your complaint of "why don't they just sell it at the cost plus a margin" doesn't work here. They're dropping the price because they're paying you for your information to make their service better. It's like Tumblr not having ads (for a period of time). "Why are you giving this to me for free?" you ask. Because then you're more likely to use us, and then we'll have a bigger user base and make tons of money later. That's how SAAS models can give away their "service" for free and still be valued at billions of dollars.
- daughart 11y agoThe more data they have the more valuable they are to drug companies. The data doesn't help them provide you anything.
- amelius 11y ago> The point is that the more data they have, the more valuable and "accurate" their analysis is This is covered by my comment that participating in research should be voluntary. > So your complaint of "why don't they just sell it at the cost plus a margin" doesn't work here. Yes, my complaint makes perfect sense here. They are selling below cost price to build themselves a bigger market. This is not a fair way of doing business, in my opinion. The fact that you are framing this as "we are paying you to help us build a bigger market share" does not make a difference. In my opinion, everything that is being built by crowdsourcing belongs in the public domain. It is not fair to have one company keeping that information hostage.
- greglindahl 11y agoFor me, the most interesting thing about my 23andMe results was that my Y chromosome confirmed the family rumor that my grandfather was not actually the son of his father. If enough people join 23andMe, it's possible that I may find my actual relatives. Many people find this sort of thing creepy. I'm OK with it. And on an even-more-personal note, as a guy with long hair, it was exciting to learn that I didn't have the male pattern baldness gene, even though my maternal grandfather was bald as an egg by the time he turned 40.
- hugh4 11y agoHow did it confirm that? Did they have a sample of your (purported) great-grandfather too?
- greglindahl 11y agoMy fathers-fathers-father was an immigrant from Norway (a village now in Sweden.) The family rumor was about a wealthy man named Cooper, a common English name. My Y chromosome is from Doggerland. Occam's Razor favors Mr. Cooper.
- hugh4 11y agoInteresting, but I'm confused. I had to look up Doggerland but apparently it's been submerged for 6000 years and was in the North Sea, why couldn't your Norwegian ancestors have come from Doggerland originally?
- greglindahl 11y agoIf you look at the modern distribution of Doggerland Y, then it's clear that it's much, much more common in England and the Netherlands than in Norway-now-Sweden. You are correct that I can't be 100% certain.
- fizixer 11y agoThis is well and good. But what about going back from 'ancestry discovery' to 'full medical discovery' just like originally conceived? FDA put a stupid ban on them, and then they got something approved but that was a fraction of what they were offering previously. Just another example of how politics and bureaucracy is hampering progress.
- adevine 11y agoYeah, I was and 23andMe customer before the ban, and I loved the data it provided. In particular, I thought 23andMe did an excellent job of describing the statistics behind genetics in layperson terms (that is, it wasn't "you're going to get this disease", but "out of a 100 people, 3 people without this gene got it, but 6 people with this gene did get it", together with great illustrations and more details to explain the probability). I thought the fact that the FDA thought consumers would be confused or overwhelmed by the analysis was kind of insulting to anyone with an elementary school education.
- swagv 11y ago23andMeh had to pivot because their egos thought they could simply ignore the FDA. But 23andMeh essentially lost several years to that hubris, and as a result many others in the genomics field have not only caught up but bypassed them.
- NN88 11y agooh snap son! Its lit!
- nacs 11y agoStrange placement on that Forbes cover of the "Viagra going up" headline while the CEO looks directly up at it: http://thumbsnap.com/i/xIyNOKkl.jpg http://thumbsnap.com/i/xIyNOKkl.jpg
- emmet 11y ago> €169 :(
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoForbes understands the investment values 23andMe at $1.1 billion. There's that number again...