Why 23andMe, Ancestry, and Helix products are artificially cheap
When I first moved to the bay, I started working at a company named Helix that has received 350 million dollars to be the next “app store for your DNA.” Like most people, I did not understand how any Silicon Valley company could ever receive so much funding for selling a product that few people have ever purchased. Who said venture capital was obsessed with companies that already showed signs of scaling?
As a bit of background, Helix was not the first of it’s kind; It came to the party 10 years late. Its three big competitors 23andMe, Ancestry, and Color came into the space first. 23andMe focused on fun information (do you blush when you drink alcohol?), Ancestry focused on information surrounding your heritage, and Color focused on cancer and health risks.
So why did Illumina, Kleiner Perkins, and other VC’s drop 350 million into a company that already had established competition? Big Pharma, that’s why. Whereas Ancestry’s business model is based off of a family tree subscription model and selling actual testing kits, the other big three have a largely different business model: developing drugs to target specific genotypes.
Genetic information (your DNA) is data unlike any other data that companies gather on us. When movie pass gathers our movie-going data this is temporary data. Our movie preferences might change as our hair goes to gray and more importantly, movies are just one small piece of our life. As a result this data is not extremely valuable. Genetic information is quite the opposite. It will never change, and not only that, with your data alone they’re able to make predictions about your family as well as your descendants. Remember how I said movie preference data is peanuts?
With this data they are able to sell it, albeit anonymized, to pharmaceutical companies who want to develop drugs and therapies that are directly targeted towards certain genotypes…. and only then they can finally make the profits. Ahhh now it all makes sense.
Well this greater availability of genetic information is not a bad thing, rather the contrary. Living with two biology PhD’s you learn a thing or two about the current research and the problems that genetics faces. The first thing I learned is that we are far, far away from the beaker baby dystopia that some herald.
I previously and incorrectly thought that most traits were inherited from a piece or two of DNA, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Your height, weight, emotional tendencies, and the vast majority of traits manifest from hundreds if not thousands of base pairs of DNA in a haystack of three billion. As a result, the best products from these DNA companies can typically explain less than 15% of your genetic results for a very limited set of traits.
There is a lot of research that still needs to be done and a lot more computational power that needs to be put to use. We can clone dogs (just ask Barbara Streisand’s cloned dogs) and change a couple base pairs to make a rabbit glow florescently, but beyond that there’s a ways to go. Since each genome takes up several gigs of data, to crunch the data for just one base pair is a pushup or two for the computer. Now involve the interaction of hundreds of base pairs, it’s pretty heavy lifting. We’re not quite there yet but we’re in for quite the ride when we get there.
