
23andMe meets FDA standards, adds back wellness reports - welder
http://blog.23andme.com/23andme-and-you/a-new-23andme-experience/
======
chaud
I would like to know how the new report compares to the old one.

Also of note, the price has gone up from $99 (as of earlier this week) to
$199.

edit: This NYTimes article has more details:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/business/23andme-will-
resu...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/business/23andme-will-resume-
giving-users-health-data.html)

 _Now, after nearly two years, 23andMe is announcing on Wednesday that it will
begin providing customers with health information again, though much less than
before and with F.D.A. approval.

The new health-related information 23andMe will provide is called carrier
status. That relates to whether people have genetic mutations that could lead
to a disease in their offspring, presuming the other parent has a mutation in
the same gene and the child inherits both mutated genes. There will be
information on 36 diseases, including cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia and
Tay-Sachs._

~~~
devonEnlis
I'm preparing a blog post on the differences between the old and new 23andMe
reports, and how they compare to a raw data analysis with Enlis Genome
Personal.

Here are the headline numbers-

Number of health-related traits reported: Old: 201 New: 36 RawData: 2109

Number of health-related variants reported: Old: 1283 New: 100 RawData: 13,537

I will also note that while they increased the price, they are still using the
same genotyping chip that they released in December 2013

~~~
xirdstl
Not speaking to the price, this makes sense. To achieve FDA approval, their
reporting is much more conservative. That's probably for the best.

~~~
greggman
I'm not saying you're wrong but would you mind explaining why you think that's
for the best?

~~~
lionyo
Statistics and risk are meaningless when your name is attached to the report.

To go to the extreme, a 0.001% chance of genetic disease can drive a person to
make emotional decisions.

------
refurb
Anyone else see this Forbes article?[1]

It seems to indicate a high level of naivety on the part of 23&Me in terms of
the regulatory requirements around genetic testing.

 _What Hibbs found was that 23andMe and the FDA were not even speaking the
same language. The FDA is guided by laws and regulations that limit what it
can say, and 23andMe wasn’t picking up on the agency’s cues. FDA officials
would leave 23andMe an opening to change the way carrier testing was
regulated, for instance, and 23andMe would ask an unrelated question._

A part of me thinks it wasn't naivety and it was more "move fast and break
things".

[1][http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/10/21/23andme...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/10/21/23andmes-
triumph-and-the-long-road-ahead/)

~~~
cubano
Is it just me or does this sounds suspiciously like the Uber/Airbnb model?

Seems to be working ok for them. Perhaps the nature of genetic testing changes
things.

~~~
mbreese
23andMe falls under Federal regulations - FDA. Uber and AirBnB operate in
largely local/state regulated markets. It's harder to move fast and break
things with a Federal regulator.

------
op00to
23andMe can do whatever they want with your data. It totally boggles my mind
that someone would give a private company legal, full, and complete access to
what makes you, you. We're still in the infancy of understanding what we can
do with our genomes. Giving all our information over to an entity without a
fiduciary responsibility to protecting your personal data is just idiotic.

~~~
aeturnum
We're still in the infancy of diagnosing psychological state through word
choice, yet uninformed people still talk to other people over chat.

We're still in the infancy of detecting disease through microbiome analysis,
yet some foolish people still meet in person without signed contracts not to
collect that information.

We're still in the infancy of analyzing video to detect mental state, yet
people routinely go out into public without comprehensive agreements not to
record or analyze their behavior.

I understand your concern about genetic information, as it's easy to
understand the impact and the potential information gleaned. That said, the
cost v.s. risks v.s. benefit of the 23andme service work for me - though I
would not say that they _should_ work for anyone else. It's good to think
about potential future risks, but believing too much in the malevolence and
competence of people from the future is often a mistake (see: lots of cold war
policies).

~~~
andrepd
There's a massive difference in the order ofd magnitude of information
acquired by recording people's body language vs legally handing them over your
genome. That sort of apples to oranges comparison does nothing for the
argument.

------
suprgeek
Can we ask for a Test and once we get the Results optionally have them destroy
all records except the financial transaction ones?

From their privacy policy:

>How is my privacy protected? >We will not share your individual-level
information with any third party without your explicit consent

Both "individual-level" and "third-party" still leave a LOT of room for things
to be shared. \- At what level is the data allowed to be shared if not
"individual-level"?

\- Exactly who are third parties (is Google a third party?) and who decides
that? Can it change tomorrow?

\- What happens in the case they are bought out by some one? If they go
bankrupt? What happens to the data?

Still too many unexplained items

~~~
kenbellows
"not 'individual-level'" sounds to me like anonymous statistical information
that is not personally identifiable; is that called out anywhere in their
privacy policy?

------
mmastrac
I hope this means we can finally upgrade our results to the latest chip, or
that they restore some of the SNPs they dropped in the later chips that make
these reports impossible to compute.

I've been waiting to unlock the Alzheimer's results for ages, but it always
tells me that "upgrading to the latest platform is unavailable".

~~~
csl
I've made a 23andMe parser that can report on this. Actually, it covers quite
a lot of their health results:

[https://github.com/cslarsen/dna-traits](https://github.com/cslarsen/dna-
traits)

The test for Alzheimers is here: [https://github.com/cslarsen/dna-
traits/blob/master/py-dnatra...](https://github.com/cslarsen/dna-
traits/blob/master/py-dnatraits/dna_traits/health.py#L17) (the algorithm used
to be patented, by the way). By closely reading the algorithm, you can
probably find out yourself, given that 23andMe still lets you browse your
genome.

To see all health reports, run this file on the downloaded genome:
[https://github.com/cslarsen/dna-traits/blob/master/py-
dnatra...](https://github.com/cslarsen/dna-traits/blob/master/py-
dnatraits/bin/health-risks.py) (you have to compile the C++ code first)

Actually was playing with the idea of monetizing off this project, but the
laws in my country prohibit me from doing so. In fact, just using the program
I made is illegal unless its my own genome.

~~~
farresito
Woah. Quite interesting! Thank you. I've been increasingly interested in
bioinformatics and your project seems quite nice. I will definitely give it a
try.

~~~
csl
Thanks. It's definitely a _lot_ of fun. And, as you can see, _some_ things are
not hard at all to detect. In fact, I was surprised how little knowledge you
need to be able to flick through genome wide association studies (GWAS) and
casually play around with their findings. (It's also fun to see how
desperately some GWAS studies seem to try to make sense of the genome --- it's
a pretty young field, I guess!)

Of course, you should be pretty careful with interpreting results as a
hobbyist (as I am). But probing your genome with a parser, like the one I've
made, is a great vehicle for piquing your intellectual curiosity.

------
esaym
Man, why is it so expensive? To test my wife and I would be nearly $400. I
mean sure, it _might_ help me be able to pre-treat any known trait based
disease but still.. If all they are doing is running some DNA through a
database, seems like the cost should getting lower, not higher.

~~~
Kneedler
I believe the $99 kits were sold as a loss leader to grow their database and
establish themselves as a leader in the space. The actual cost to the company
was/is much higher.

~~~
mbreese
Selling kits isn't how they make their money. So, selling the tests at a loss
shouldn't be surprising.

------
mtgx
I wonder if this is why they finally got their approval:

[http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-
are-...](http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-asking-
ancestry-com-and-23andme-for-their-customers-dna/)

~~~
travisp
Probably not: [https://www.23andme.com/transparency-
report/](https://www.23andme.com/transparency-report/)

~~~
superkuh
If a US national security letter with a gag were used it wouldn't show up
here.

~~~
travisp
Absolutely true. But that has nothing to do with the original comment which
was about traditional law enforcement requests for information. Given that
23andme says they haven't actually given any information to the police, it
seems unlikely that cooperation with the police is why their product is
approved.

------
PeanutNore
In my limited understanding, this means that you can now pay twice as much as
before to receive much less information than before.

There must be a lab located outside the US (and with no US footprint or
marketing) that will nonetheless provide full results to anyone providing a
sample.

~~~
weisser
This headline (and the one from the NYTimes) is a bit misleading – 23andMe is
resuming giving health data but they’re actually giving a _different_ kind of
data. This new data is related to carrier status – genetic mutations that
could lead to disease in your offspring. They still hope to gain approval to
give info on health risks (what they provided up until 2013), but there is no
public estimate for how long it might take. It will happen, it’s just a matter
of time.

------
Hydraulix989
This news of their FDA approval came right after news of their latest $155mm
funding round which tells us that their new investors DEFINITELY knew about
this before the public. [1]

I can't imagine Fidelity Capital pouring millions into a company that got
blocked by the FDA, and I was shocked to hear the news that they raised that
much money until today when I found out that the FDA approved their DNA
screening. I mean, they were dead as in last nail in the coffin status before
that.

Not only that, recent news just broke that law enforcement now have access to
members' DNA from 23andMe -- the federal government must have been appeased.
[2]

As Saul Goodman says: "There's always a way to oil everyone's lock."

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/14/23andme-raises-115m-to-
gro...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/14/23andme-raises-115m-to-grow-its-dna-
health-test-technology-globally/)

[2]
[http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/10/19/3713666/police-t...](http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/10/19/3713666/police-
tap-ancestry-for-dna/)

------
oneJob
also, I don't trust them with my DNA data anymore.

~~~
exacube
why, what happened?

~~~
breitling
I remember reading somewhere that they share the DNA info with gov't agencies.

~~~
cryoshon
Probably. Unfortunately, this precludes someone who is privacy-conscious from
using these products, as cool as they may seem. I can't imagine how the
government would put this information to anything other than malicious use.

SNP sequencing is the ultimate fingerprint, far more individually identifying
than anything else as of yet. Imagine having 900,000+ criterion to cross
reference to determine identity.

~~~
darkmighty
If the gov't really want a DNA sample from you is it that hard to obtain? I
understand this allows them to do it en masse though.

~~~
calgoo
What happened was that the police was using some publicly available data to
cross reference with cold cases. Then when they found a familiar match, the
produced a warrant to get the identity of the family member that was
registered. The main issue was that the info was available, so some tech just
ran the comparison. However, it feels like it would be way to easy to request
the information directly with a warrant and that's it. Using something like:
"We need to save the women and children, here is a list of unidentified DNA
samples, please compare them to all your database."

------
tdaltonc
Why don't they just setup a partner outside the US? The US based company
distributes the 'device' (ie the check swab) and the sequencing, and then
users can export their data to a non-US website that explains what all of the
SNP's mean?

------
andrewtbham
Please someone in another country provide the data 23 and me used to
provide!!!

~~~
calebm
What information is lacking from the new reports? And do they provide all the
raw data? If so, is it possible to do your own research based on that raw
data? (I'm not arguing with you - I wish they would provide all the data
possible).

~~~
ac29
23andme provides full raw data. You are welcome to do any research you want on
it using public databases like SNPedia.

------
dekhn
Welcome back to the fold, 23&Me. Are the 23&Me health reports still saying
that tongue rolling is a Mendelian trait? If you don't get details like that
right, it's hard to trust the rest of your health data.

------
rjurney
This is cool, and I'm glad its back. That being said, I got about 3 minutes
joy from reading my profile again. Paid for it five years ago. Still not
useful for me :/

------
LordHumungous
Welcome to the world of medicine techies, where you have to comprehensively
prove that your idea works or gtfo. Quite different from the Silicon Valley
ethos that you're used to.

