4 ms·

I interviewed a couple years ago with a startup that was a commercial and research leader in personalized medicine with a portfolio of patent-protected genetic

I interviewed a couple years ago with a startup that was a commercial and research leader in personalized medicine with a portfolio of patent-protected genetic tests. After a laughably bad interview, I looked a little deeper into their business model. A little Googling revealed the real business model was to convince doctors and medical groups to order these tests and pass the costs along to insurance companies and Medicare. These tests are pretty useless in most cases, probably not a lot different from 23andMe. Your grandmother goes into see her doctor with a cough. Her doctor now throws in a couple genetic tests to go along with the normal blood tests and obligatory cat-scan. And the cost of American medicine continues to rise with the same lousy results.

lohengramm 10y ago
Are 23andMe tests useless? Don't get me wrong, I am just curious about it.
- dorfsmay 10y ago
  To help curing the common cold in a specific individual at a specific time, yes.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  Depends on the definition of "useless" :) They used to be better until FDA cracked down and prohibited them from providing a detailed analysis of the DNA results where they would do a very decent breakdown of what kind of decease you might be predisposed to based on the results etc. From what I understand they still do this in Canada though, also there are online services that can take your results and provide some sort of an extended analysis, never dealt with them though.
  - neuronexmachina 10y ago
    There's also several 3rd-party tools, like promethease, that can take the raw data from 23andme and produce much of the old detailed analysis: http://www.23andyou.com/3rdparty http://www.23andyou.com/3rdparty
- Asparagirl 10y ago
  23andMe saved my friend Lara's life. They discovered her BRCA mutation, which led to her getting an MRI rather than a normal mammogram (which she was too young for anyway and which missed the tumor). This caught her cancer in time. Her blog about it: https://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/11/how-genealogy-saved-or-significantly.html?m=1 https://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/11/how-genealogy-sa... Irony #1: Stupid and paternalistic laws meant she had to mail in her spit kit from another state, rather than Maryland, where she lives. Irony #2: She got her diagnosis the day the FDA shut down 23andMe's ability to give people their medical test results.

lohengramm 10y ago

Are 23andMe tests useless? Don't get me wrong, I am just curious about it.

dorfsmay 10y ago
To help curing the common cold in a specific individual at a specific time, yes.
ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
Depends on the definition of "useless" :) They used to be better until FDA cracked down and prohibited them from providing a detailed analysis of the DNA results where they would do a very decent breakdown of what kind of decease you might be predisposed to based on the results etc. From what I understand they still do this in Canada though, also there are online services that can take your results and provide some sort of an extended analysis, never dealt with them though.
- neuronexmachina 10y ago
  There's also several 3rd-party tools, like promethease, that can take the raw data from 23andme and produce much of the old detailed analysis: http://www.23andyou.com/3rdparty http://www.23andyou.com/3rdparty
Asparagirl 10y ago
23andMe saved my friend Lara's life. They discovered her BRCA mutation, which led to her getting an MRI rather than a normal mammogram (which she was too young for anyway and which missed the tumor). This caught her cancer in time. Her blog about it: https://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/11/how-genealogy-saved-or-significantly.html?m=1 https://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/11/how-genealogy-sa... Irony #1: Stupid and paternalistic laws meant she had to mail in her spit kit from another state, rather than Maryland, where she lives. Irony #2: She got her diagnosis the day the FDA shut down 23andMe's ability to give people their medical test results.