On Sunday, the genetic testing and heritage firm 23andMe introduced that it had entered Chapter 11 chapter and was asking a courtroom to rearrange its sale. The corporate has been shedding cash for years, and a battle between its board and CEO about future instructions led to the complete board resigning again in September. Mentioned CEO, Anne Wojcicki, has now resigned and shall be pursuing an try and buy the corporate and take it non-public.
At stake is the destiny of genetic knowledge from the corporate’s 15 million clients. The corporate has secured sufficient funding to proceed operations whereas a purchaser is discovered, and regardless that US regulation limits how genetic knowledge can be utilized, the pending sale has raised vital privateness issues.
Dangerous enterprise
The corporate launched across the time that “gene chips” first allowed individuals to broadly scan the human genome for websites the place variations have been frequent. A number of of those variants are related to illnesses, and 23andMe acquired approval to check for plenty of these. However its huge promoting level for many individuals was the chance to discover their heritage. This relied on trying broadly on the patterns of variation and evaluating these to the patterns usually discovered in several geographic areas. It is an imperfect evaluation, however it may typically present an honest big-picture decision of an individual’s ancestry.
23andMe confronted plenty of challenges, although. For starters, the gene chips shortly turned commodities, permitting a wide variety of rivals to enter the sector, a few of which had stronger backgrounds in issues like linking genealogies to public information. This commodification additionally meant that many potential 23andMe companions within the pharmaceutical business, who could be excited by gene/illness linkages, might affordably construct their very own databases or just depend on a few of the public sources which have since been developed, just like the UK’s Biobank.
