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Two Companies Now Offering Personal Gene Sequencing
corded writes "Yesterday, deCODE genetics announced the launch of their $985 personal genotyping product, deCODEme (video), beating their competitors to market. Perhaps not coincidentally, 23andMe's website is suddenly much more informative today, and the New York Times features a preview of 23andMe's $999 offering. deCODEme and 23andMe will scan about a million and 600,000 sites across the genome, respectively and assess your risk for common diseases, along with providing information about ancestry, physical traits, and the ability to compare genes with friends and family."
They want my sperm!
My only question is: will some company will come after this one with a portfolio of gene pantents and licensing terms?
I don't know about you guys, but I think that's f'in awesomely cool!
Torrent?
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
Sergey Brin is going to marry Anne, co-foundeer of 23andMe. Today read about it somewhere, but forgot where the article was from..
I think
Amazing news! One step further will be exacting the analysis and actually telling the person about how his ancestors looked like, what color his children's eyes are gonna be, and whether he will die due to pancreatic cancer and etc =)
Why don't we all support the research in biology (to create intelligent machines) and we are starting from Silicon and basically from nothing.
While reading this, it occured to me that making a living organism more intelligent can be an alternative way to silicon-based AI, what's your opinion?
There's plenty of room at the bottom! Richard P. Feynmann
I wouldn't do this until some law is passed saying that if a test shows I am prone to some genetic condition that the insurance companies can't refuse me service because it is a pre-existing condition. Ignorance is financial bliss.
Ascii artist &
What about privacy ? How could one be sure that they don't keep the records in some kind of database ? The possibility to make comparisons with friends/family seems like a pretext to keep that kind of data.
What about the genetic information that cannot be interpreted as of today ? Will it get stored anyways, leaving future analysis possible ? (Is there a subscription for updates ??
What kind of questions these sort of tests can answer that you can't answer ? Besides disease detection (I thought there were people specialized in such matters ... like ... doctors ...), what purpose serve the answers ?
I read this story earlier in the day on another site and I still don't understand one thing. Many companies offer genetic testing for specific genetic mutations for a heck of a lot more money, and they hold the "patents." For example, Myriad charges over $3,000 just for a BRCA1/2 (breast/ovarian cancer mutation) test.
So, are we really getting the full picture with these full-sequence deals? How do they get around the patents, such as Myriad's? What am I missing? Are you just getting some report of your sequence or are they listing out for you all of your known bad mutations?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
I think it's nice to get 1 million markers genotyped, but what about a comprehensive plan after? My idea would be something like navigenics (www.navigenics.com). Nevertheless, family history is way more informative...
People in past discussions mentioned this, but the ability to compare genes with family members may shock more than a few people who do not share as many genetic characteristics with their father and siblings as they thought. Apparently, estimates of conceptive infidelity place the natural rate at a much higher percentage than actually known to the conceived children.
Is this anonymous? Namely so that if it turns out I have some risk factor for a genetic condition, that my health insurance can't find out about it and raise my premiums.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
This is great! But who owns the code? The NY Times article says that you aren't given your code, you have to view it through the company's viewer.
Also, who owns your genetic code in a larger sense?
I remember a funny science fiction story, which maybe isn't so funny anymore.
A football team attempted to patent the genetic code for one of it's star running backs, so they could clone him and assure the success of the franchise forever. When he complained, he was told he should have read the fine print of the contract better...
The football team's legal team were trumped, when his parents stepped up and proclaimed thier rights as the original creators of this particular bit of intellectual property...
(i feel inspired to sign up, this is my first post to slashdot, posting is fun!)
What if you have a more serious condition (or are genetically predisposed to getting some form of cancer for example). I'd imagine insurance companies would love to get ahold of that information. What's going to stop these companies from turning around and selling my DNA records to third parties?
That's a possibility. It's only a matter of time before sperm banks make the most of their .... supply.
WTF?
There are states that don't let their citizens see the risk assessment of their own decoded genes?
Don't let the luddites and paranoid types get you down! This rocks. Great winter solstice gift, too!
Wow, now you will know whether your offspring has all kinds of nasty diseases, without consulting a physician !
What brave new world we live in..
Lol, it is so funny to read the comments from this story. I found amusing how there are already various comments wondering how would that affect negatively to their health insurance... whereas this would be *great* for say, someone under the NHS as it would allow the doctors to focus on monitoring those specific genetic conditions.
It just show how screwed up the paradigm of insured medicine is... It is a good thing that this sort of genetic monitoring is becoming available for everybody. However, I find it unfortunate to see that it can be used against those people by the same corporations who are supposed to look for your health... go capitalism!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I always knew Gattaca was a documentary!
Will this bring genetic engineering 1 step closer to public access? Will the public eventually be able to order customized genes for the expression of desirable physical features? I think this would be pretty cool. Or could it be like the distopian city Rapture in Bioshock where mutant splicers running amock? Or will government regulation stifle it?
People with lower risk pay lower premiums, people with higher risk pay higher premiums.
This is what the insurance business is all about.
Insurance companies now have to charge high premiums because they're having a hard time assessing the individual risk levels. When more tools are available to help measure this risk, they'll be able to charge the right premiums, which will be on average lower than what they are now. In other words they will exhaustively test every customer, seize upon every little bitty DNA defect they can find, assess it as a potential risk and jack up the premiums? Perhaps I am being paranoid here but I put the insurance industry right beside lawyers and estate agents on my list of blood sucking parasites that I mistrust on principle. Which puts them just a couple of pegs above 419ers, Enron executives, the Bush administration stooges who cooked up the Iraqi WMD evidence and generally all other other low life scam artists.
How do we expect insurance companies to handle this? What about the "two publics"?
On one hand, doomsayers here are saying insurance companies can choose to not insure someone with certain genes or charge them insane amounts.
Scary, but the solution is obvious -
[1] force insurance companies to ensure ANYONE
[2] legally define and enforce a ceiling rate they can charge, regardless of how bad your genes look.
I can already hear privacy advocates screaming and yelling "why give them our genes in the first place"? That's a moot point for two reasons -
1. It's a losing battle. Eventually, our genes (or those of our relatives) will be accessible.
2. Hiding our genes in general os shooting ourselves in the foot. Some (and I belong to this group, hence will use "we") may WANT their genes to be publicly available, much like I want source to be available. So products, offerings, solutions to problems and industry can spring due to their availability.
The most obvious reason not to hide our genes, however, is simple: people who have non-fucked genes will want to, they will pay a lower premium. Money talks.
Here is how it will most likely evolve from what we have today:
We pay today default premium X. I will assume charging >X is not financially feasible due to competition, and that X is the sweet spot.
Insurance companies will offer a genetic evaluation kit. It allows one to PRIVATELY evaluate himself, and submit the results to the insurance companies if his genes are ok, thereby halving his premium to 0.5X.
After a period of adoption, let's say several years, The percentage of "fucked genes" individuals in the default pool will be much higher, as many of the "ok genes" individuals have opted to pay less by letting their genes be known to the insurance company. The insurance expenses associated with maintaining the default pool will go up, causing X to go up to 2X, causing more and more people to abandon that pool.
At some point government regulation kicks in, and sets a government-controlled ceiling rate for the default rate (much like they control minimum wage).
Since the default rate is now at 2X, the insurance companies set the "ok genes" rate back from 0.5X to X, as it allows them to both maintain their incentive for people to abandon the default-paying group and share their genes, as well as allowing them to charge as much as the market allows - X.
It may be 0.9X (as the minority that costs the most is covering its expenses through a higher rate and possible government subsidation, hence making the competition-induced sweet-spot lower than when this included many expensive cases to treat).
I predict this will happen, as this is where the incentives are today. Note that the primary driving force here is consumer "greed", not insurance companies. People will want to pay that lower premium, even if crappy prophets such as myself predict that once the "fucked genes" people were isolated in the default group, everyone's rates will go back to what they were before (except the defaulters that will pay more). People will FLOCK once lower rates are offered, because people are damn well motivated by paying less.
Insurance companies WILL know our genes and it's a losing battle.
Think it through. Share your opinion.
It's something that requires thought and debate NOW.
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If you are interested in just your ancestry part check out National Geographic's Genographic project:
:)
https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html
Less money and pretty interesting. I did it myself and was pleased with the results. Very interesting indeed!
And yet in most US states there is a irrebuttable presumption that a husband is the father of his wife's child if the child was born during the marriage.
So, even if you can prove (DNA testing) that she had an affair and "your child" isn't your child, the courts, in the divorce, will still treat the child as yours and force you to pay support etc. This. of course, is all done in the interest of the child.
Also, paternity fraud (lying about the father of the child) is not considered domestic abuse. It is A-OK as far as the courts are concerned.
Welcome to equality
respectively! deCODEme 1 million, the latter 600,000
The three main personalized genomics companies that have hinted at their offerings (23andMe, deCODEme, and Navigenics) are all basically offering the same product, SNP genotyping:
...however, deCODEme is founded by perhaps the largest private genetics-centered biopharma firm. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the IT-strong 23andMe competes with the science-strong deCODEme.
23andMe: 550k SNPs + 30k custom SNPs, $999
deCODEme: >1M SNPs, $985
Navigenics: $2500, with hints at a "lock-in" model where you purchase a subscription service for continued updates as science understands more about disease:genotype correlation.
One company that was not mentioned is Knome. They haven't released details of their service, but instead of SNPs, they plan to offer whole genome sequencing. This is the direction that all of the above companies will head, once it's economically feasible to sequence the whole genome.
(Most of this has been summarized on my site: http://seqanswers.com)
Suppose they just make some shit up and tell you it's Your genome. How will you know? With only two companies, even if you were to have it done by another company you would not know which version was right if either. I suppose you could submit the same thing twice to one company under different fake names but they could also be devious too. Just sample your genome for a signature region (e.g. a restriction digest) and they essentially have a hash code for recognizing you if you try to sneak a second one in. SO they give you back the same thing they gave you the first time.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I do too think it's cool, and the search for genes that might pose a health risk sounds like something great for public health. I don't know what it would implicate, but I suppose it might tell you how likely you are to have a certain type of cancer/cardiovascular disease/alzheimer and allow you to stay on the look-out for what you're the most likely to have.
Actually I hope one day (within the next 20 years) gene sequencing for health purposes will be made systematically for health purposes and stored in a super-high security database that other branches of the government/law enforcement couldn't get to, except of course via a special warrant emitted by a judge. If you think about it, it's not that unfeasible, even now. If there are about 4 million new-borns every year in the USA, and that performing sequencing really costs $1000 (but we can safely assume it actually costs less), then it would cost $4 billion a year, which makes it almost affordable (although probably not worth it, and surely not going to happen anytime soon).
You just got troll'd!
My new startup will allow parents to sequence the genes of their male offspring to include a third testicle. What better way to increase the odds that your bloodline will survive the coming century of famine and war? And that's only the beginning. It is not government's role to interfere with progress or business, so nobody better try and stop me.
Are you genetically similar to your friends?
How well do your friends know your hereditary defects?
and my personal favourite,
You have been splattered with X's DNA! Do you wish to Have the Baby, or Abort?
Join to Impregnate Chumps | Ignore
(by submitting your genetic information to Facebook, you are granting Facebook the right to use your clone in targeted advertising)
Be careful how you implement that. If you make the insurance business unprofitable, shareholders will vote in boards that will stop writing new policies and invest the company's assets elsewhere (or distribute them through dividends), and nobody will find it the best use of their money to form new insurance businesses.
Just a tidbit, 23AndMe was created by Anne Wojcicki, who is Sergey Brin's wife
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It seems to me that nobody really wants to get sick. So by seeing that people with predispositions to certain types of sickness get informed about this, then the insurance companies would save on payouts, because the informed customers will take precautions against the weaknesses/predispositions that they're warned about in advance.
That system already exists. It is called "not having insurance". Insurance companies need to charge MORE for their premiums than they pay out in benefits. If they can pinpoint exactly how much they will be paying out for your benefits because they have good enough data to charge you the "right" premium, they would have to charge you the same amount you would pay without insurance plus a little for overhead and profit.
The point of insurance is because people like me will hardly ever go to the doctor, and other people will go more often.
You need to put down that glass of the current Koolaide you're on and pull your head out of your ass and look around you at reality.
He has spoken no FUD, but you sure are.
Have you not been paying attention these past few years to world events?
Drop your crack pipe and step away from your computer or crawl up out of your mom's basement for that last bag of Cheetos in the cupboard-whatever, you are not contributing here- you are just annoying noise.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The poster is an idiot. It's a service - not a product. You can't just buy something off the shelf to examine your dna - which would be _really_ cool. It's just some service where they test you.
The whole notion of insurance relies on statistical analysis, and health insurance companies purportedly (but not actually) cover a population with the knowledge that some portion of it will be stricken with given ailments. For instance, they know that a 60 year old has an average 20% (or whatever) chance of seeing his doctor because of back pain, and will draw on the insurance pool for it. A well-run insurance company will lay off their bets, structure their compensation to reward preventative medicine, and base their premiums on actuarial tables drawn from their target population- say, steelworkers in a company plan.
If the companies can start to bias their coverage based on genetic tests, a very large portion of the population becomes uninsurable.
This would be fine if the US (other countries differ, mind you) didn't rely on health insurance companies to pay for the majority of medical procedures performed. Medical costs for many serious but treatable conditions are out of the reach of the average consumer. Rates are set by what insurers will pay hospitals, not what individuals will pay doctors. Look up the cost for an emergency appendectomy some time- the cost is very high for a common and unavoidable condition that's otherwise fatal if untreated. This is peculiar considering the very large number of doctors and hospitals equipped to perform decent appendectomies.
Considering that most of the population carries genetic risk factors for various illnesses, the way the current insurance model is structured would mean that the genetically "good" minority would have access to medical care, while the genetically "bad" majority would find themselves in hock for common medical conditions, and not necessarily the ones for which they were refused coverage. The market might correct itself in time, with medical costs falling, or more realistic assessments of genetic risk (as opposed to our rather crude current estimates), but the market correction could take decades, and many people would be injured in the interim, with no societal benefit, and much harm.
The problem with the American insurance system is this: as I said before, insurance companies are supposed to cover their bets, and lay off big bets in particular. However, anyone paying attention to insurance rates will note that they rise with the falling of the stock market, and fall with the rise of the market. This is because most insurance companies, rather than covering their bets like a good bookie, they invest in less than sure things, because they're also publicly held companies. The urge is to win in the short-term, by investing their pool in the market, to the benefit of their shareholders. But they're playing the odds on the other end, too. They know on average how much they'll pay out in a year, and anything they can do to reduce their predicted liability, they'll do. This, again, improves their stock prices.
But you see where this is going: the insurance company is transformed from a place where individuals can hedge against unpredictable events to one where shareholders bet against those individuals. One way of allaying risk is to cover as large a pool as possible, to let the averages work. But companies have gone for a more profitable strategy- in this case, the insurance company's interest is to get as many healthy people on the program, paying as much in premiums as they can, and kick out as many sick, or potentially sick people they can. This is good business in a market economy, but bad for consumers overall.
Here, the primary public interest should be long-term. That is, the gene pool quality. The secondary public interest is the economy; we need smart and strong people who will work.
A fair deal is that we treat people with genetic defects if they agree to not produce kids.
I think this opens up endless possibilities. Some of them good, some of they may not be encouraging.... 1) Looking at particular gene structure, it can be identified if a person shares the same gene sequence as another person in the world. For example if a person shares the same gene (such as Neuron characteristic ) as Einstein he could be as intelligent as he is. This conclusion could be used as a more important measure of intelligence quantifier rather than Tests like GRE/SAT etc. It need not be just for intelligence, it could be for anyother characteristic, such as bravery, risk taking attitude etc. DNA could be the "First Liner" in your resume! 2) It could be an important characteristic in choosing partner. For eg: If you share the same gene sequence for some disease.... u will know that your kid will get it for sure. Also women/men may choose to marry a person if he/she has a positive gene. Like some genes may be a turn on to certain people. 3) Criminal traits could be narrowed down and watched! 4) Wife having a conversation to husband " Your gene shows that you have high chance of getting cholestrol, dont eat cheese so much! " 5) Another instance " Hubby, we both have great XYZ genes(gene good in "communication") but not so great ABC gene (gene good in "Logic/Analysis", I think our son should get into communications rather than science"
When a thief sees a saint, all he sees are his pockets!
deCODEme's website shows the $985 price as "promotional". I haven't seen anyone mention that in the discussion yet. If they are offering analysis of roughly 2x the markers of 23andMe, they would be smart to hike the price later to bring it more in line with Navigenics'. That said, it's still a heck of a deal, and I welcome the competition between these three companies.
Slashdot reader should be happy. The momentary 3 companies (remember Netscape?) will result in "Personalized Genomics" and even larger, "PostGenetic Medicine, largely on-line" with every person's highest ranking motivation - health. This "GenomeNet boom" will be orders of magnitude larger than the "Internet boom" ever was - since it carries the internet itself to a higher level as a subset: Issues are tracked for years on http://www.junkdna.com/ Just as with "Internet", privacy issues will be horrendous; the threat is much more severe than with "Internet". The present business models are obviously unripe; cf. DeCodeMe and 23andMe both wrestling with "anonymous" DNA sample submission. Loopholes abound. For the usual slashdot reader, however, there are incredibly lucrative opportunities: The technology is much more demanding compared to challenges of "Internet boom". (Among others, interdisciplinary domain-expertise is fetches high prices). The science, underlying both "Personalized Genomics" and "PostGenetic Medicine" is turning from molecular biology to informatics. The "ENCODE-release" (June 14, 2007) was essentially a capitulation of molecular biology to informatics. Both Big Pharma, Big IT and Big Venture Capital are already incomparably more involved than at the time of Netscape. (Merck bought and essentially informatics-company [SiRNA] for $1.1 Billion, one (23andMe) of the presently 3 "Personalized Genomics for Consumers" companies is backed by BOTH a Big Pharma (Genentech)and a Big IT (Google). Another of the 3 (Navigenics) is backed by THREE of the most prestigeous VCs (KPCB, MDV and Sequoia). I suggest, nobody should lose out from this one! pellionisz_at_junkdna.com
It will not stop by 3 companies (23andme backed by Google and Genentech, Navigenics backed by KPCB, MDV and Sequoia, and DeCodeMe that started on money from Roche). Competitor IT companies (Microsoft, Apple etc), competitor VC companies (DFJ, Abingworth; many from the at least 50 VC-s that listened to Venter on Sand Hill Road last week will join the fray). Big Pharma in addition to Genentech and Roche will also join in (Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, etc). However, the business models (securing privacy) and the technology to work out the information system is a task for "technology focal points" such as Silicon Valley, Texas, San Diego, Boston (with outsourcing, of course, globally). The underlying biotech is presently the microarrays by Illumina (presently leading) and Affymetrix (already trailing). Since neither was developed for "Online PostGenetic Medicine", chances are that this "internet boom, round two" will also revolutionize microarray technology, and eventually merge it with the already announced "$100 whole genome sequencing" (Complete Genomics). See more analysis at http://example.com/