23AndMe Launches
Here’s one to watch: 23AndMe, a California startup co-founded by Anne Wojicki, Sergey Brin’s wife, has launched its initial Personal Genome Service. (NYT Coverage, WIRED Coverage)
To use the service, customers submit a saliva sample, which is analyzed for a set of SNP’s on a microarray by Illumina. Then, the data is analyzed by 23AndMe’s software. The initial offerings from the service include a Gene Journal that provides personalized risk assessments, analyses of one’s ancestry and family tree, and general visualization tools to browse your genome.
It will be interesting to see if this can get any traction in the marketplace, given the $999 price tag, and the positioning toward general interest in genetics, rather than therapeutic applications. I for one, would love to do this. But I can’t quite afford it. Someday.
