3 ms·
Their kit is 99 dollars, but how expensive is the actual DNA testing nowadays ? It's my understanding from this [0] video that it is approximately 1000 dollars
by hyperorca 3y ago
Their kit is 99 dollars, but how expensive is the actual DNA testing nowadays ? It's my understanding from this [0] video that it is approximately 1000 dollars for the whole genome, but 23&Me sequence only a tiny portion of the genome (above video mentions 500 000 bases out of 6 billion total bases of human genome), and that sequencer processes thousands of samples in parallel, so there is some economy of scale factors. It is sometimes very confusing how all these tech/techish companies have such bad financials.
[0] https://youtu.be/C3T_IaIGQxo?t=141 https://youtu.be/C3T_IaIGQxo?t=141
- icegreentea2 3y agoTheir financial reports consistently paint approximately 50% gross profit (revenue - cost of revenue). However, their R&D burn is enormous. Sales, marketing, general and admin costs are approximately equal to their gross profits. In an alternate reality, you probably could have structured 23andme into a company making modest net profit. But that would not have matched the 6 billion price valuation either. And it's quite likely that a substantial part of the R&D burn was because they recognized the limitations of their core product. https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-details/23andme-reports-fy2023-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-financial https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
- htrp 3y agoThe problem might be that those other 6 billion bases have all of the signal that you need for drug discovery and rare disease research.