23andMe made a name for itself sell DNA test kit , but today it announced aradical newfangled direction : The company will start mining its vast database of DNA sequences to create new drug . The science of how they could do that is fascinating — but it raises a lot of futurist ethical questions too .
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The annunciation today comes after the company madeseveral dealsearlier this class to sell its genetic data to bragging pharmaceutic companies . Now it seems that 23andMe is bringing the drug discovery business sector in - house , too , and they ’ve created a unexampled therapeutics segmentation headed by Genentech veteran Richard Scheller .
That ’s a major variety for a small company that presently has zero lab space . 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki secern Gizmodo that the companionship will be hiring dozens of Modern employees over the next year . But the trouble remains that drug find is slow — very tiresome . Silicon Valley go tight . There are challenges no matter how many human minds and how much computational power you throw at the trouble .
Mining DNA for drug targets is murky, barely charted territory
The fair drug takes 14 long time and $ 1 billion to bring to grocery . But Wojcicki is hoping that her company ’s genetic data can make drug find a more streamlined cognitive operation . The goal is to take the personal information from 23andMe ’s surveys — who has a family account of heart disease , for example — and attempt to happen genetic mutations that correlate with them . Once relevant cistron are name , scientists can explore possible drug or gene therapy to target them .
But 23andMe is scarce the first with these ambitions . The hope of the genetical code has been floating around ever since we set out sequencing the human genome in the XC . alternatively of curing cancer in the intervening decades , however , scientist find that DNA is a destiny more complicated than we thought . A cistron that induce breast cancer in one adult female does nothing in another . Multiple gene ingredient into most disease like cancer , meat disease , and Parkinson ’s . There is seldom a simple nerve pathway associate a individual factor definitively to disease .
Wojcickitold the WSJthat several years ago , research worker at 23andMe believed they ’d found a chromosomal mutation protect high - risk hoi polloi from Parkinson ’s , but it did n’t pan off out . This and many other failure are why drug discovery takes so long and is so expensive .
Despite all these challenge , 23andMe may be in an excellent position to start bringing down the costs of drug development . It has a lot of genetic data — about 680,000 of its 850,000 customers have sign over their genetic information for inquiry . But the central thing is that these customers can be contacted again for follow - ups . If 23andMe want to pile up more data on a given disease , say hypertension , it can shoot surveys to its customers .
The problem of privacy
Your desoxyribonucleic acid can bring out a lot about you , from disease vulnerability to what you take care like — and you might not desire strangers to have access to that information . That ’s why 23andMe has been very thrifty about acquiring consent for their research .
When I brought up privacy issues with using people ’s deoxyribonucleic acid for drug discovery , Wojcicki talked about affected role and consumer empowerment . Her troupe make on-line biotic community for patient role and involves them in research . In theSarcoma Research Community , for object lesson , the company hasmet directly with patientsand engaged them in discussion groups . That said , these kinds of community of interests also entail that 23andMe has set itself up for the ultimate form of targeted marketing if and when its drugs come out .
But is this really a privacy concern ? The outcome is thorny because we ’re only just beginning to see the outer limits of how much personal information embedded is in DNA . In 2013 , geneticist Yaniv Erlich found that anonymous research participantscould be identify from their DNAand entropy readily available online .
Another issue is how much data 23andMe really has . For exemplar , 23andMe ’s test kit traditionally wait for SNPs , single mutations that correlate with a particular trait . But now that whole genome sequencing has get a whole lot cheaper , the 23andMe can go back and sequence any saliva samples that have been deposit , extracting far more information customers engender in their genetical study . Wojcicki says roughly half of all customers have opted to bank their spittle .
I do n’t think 23andMe has nefarious plans up its sleeves , and help to heal Parkinson ’s is an unambiguously good cause . But 23andMe has a immense transmissible database now , which is always expanding and along with the company ’s large patient residential area . What will happen to that data point in the future , when we know more about DNA ? The company ’s patronage model has already morphed more than once . It could morph again .
That ’s a peck to guess about when handing over a ampule of spit .
meet the generator at[email protected ] .
23andMeBiologygenetic testingGenomicsScience
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