Comment by LarsDu88

Comment by LarsDu88 3 days ago

7 replies

If the board is resigning, and the company is selling DNA kits, running a telemedicine operation, selling pharmceuticals online AND developing cancer drugs at a 180 million dollar market cap...

It's quite possible there was no plan at all...

AlbertCory 3 days ago

I saw Ann when she gave a talk at Google (that was when she was still married to Sergey). They had spit cups we could use if we wanted our DNA sequenced. I didn't.

Their business plan was straight out of South Park:

1. Collect lots of DNA

2. ??????

3. Profit!!

  • marcinzm 2 days ago

    Isn't that the case for almost every single VC backed startup?

    • hennell 2 days ago

      s/dna/data and you're pretty much any tech business.

burningChrome 3 days ago

>>> selling pharmceuticals online

That would explain them selling 5 million users DNA information to GSK.

Earlier this summer, the often-scrutinized at-home genetic testing company 23andMe sold genetic data from five million customers to the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). This surprised a lot of their customers who had forgotten that they consented to this when they signed up for the service.

https://cglife.com/blog/23andme-sold-your-genetic-data-to-gs...

  • Y_Y 2 days ago

    https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

    This is complicated. The don't just zip up all the customer data and send it over, at least they say that they run aggregated queries for GSK and just tell them the answer. But then they say that the data is "anonymized" before this, which seems unnecessary and impossible.

    Imho it's very difficult to anonymize any data, and especially something like DNA. Without an external audit amd some mathematical guarantee (e.g. differntial privacy) I work on the assumption that they do the bare minimum to pass legal muster but anyone who made the effort could confidently associate the data with real people after the fact.

  • LarsDu88 2 days ago

    OP here. These headlines are simply exaggerated. 23andme sells mostly anonymous aggregated GWAS mapping results to companies like GSK as far as I'm aware