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The 23andMe data is amazingly useful for academic research too. I am familiar with a study (but not involved), soon to be published, that used their data to ide
by biomcgary 10y ago
The 23andMe data is amazingly useful for academic research too. I am familiar with a study (but not involved), soon to be published, that used their data to identify genetic variants responsible for a particular problem with pregnancy. The price was phenomenally lower than a more typical genome wide association study (GWAS) of which there are several publicly funded efforts. The results are much cleaner than previous studies simply due to the large number of individuals involved. The privacy controls are very stringent too.
- bradleyjg 10y agoNo issue with the fact that it's a convenience sample?
- jonlucc 10y agoThey've also been offering to pharma companies the ability to help find cohorts of patients to make clinical trials much cheaper. Say we have a drug we think works in a sliver of patients with muscular dystroph; we can either go screen tons of diagnosed patients to find the cohort we think will respond, or we can go ask 23andMe to send some patients with the required genetic profile our way.
- dogma1138 10y agoActually from everyone I talked too, 23andMe is pretty useless since they do very shallow sequencing, the amount of actual correlation is fairly low, and false positives and false negatives is actually quite high.
- jghn 10y agoThey don't do sequencing at all. What they're doing is using DNA SNP chips which will identify your genotype in the several million positions that tend to vary from person to person.
- biomcgary 10y agoAlthough the variant data is sparse, the utility of the data depends on the study design and what is being studied. In the one case that I am familiar with, the data turns out to be very powerful, but there are some things about the study that may be unique.