Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 458 posts

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#191

Post by wahern »

dekhn wrote: post #166
wahern wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the last big 23andMe thread at least one researcher commented that their data has been immensely useful. And I'm fairly certain I've read a few similar comments on HN before then. A researcher friend of mine made fun of me for signing up to 23andMe when they first offered their test. SNPs, he told me, didn't tell you much of substance. To which I replied, haven't the last 20 years (almost 30, now) of genetic resea…

Researchers talk a big game, but genomics has turned out to be a massive disappointment and really oversold. SNP analysis is useful, but leaves out a lot of important variation. Also, it's taken the field a long time to understand that most interesting phenotypes are complex nonlinear functions of many different variations, which makes health discovery far more challenging.

> SNP analysis is useful, but leaves out a lot of important variation

That's true of everything in medicine, especially without SNP analysis. And it'll remain true even with whole genome sequencing.

I think the biggest problem is that until now medicine has revolved around the study and treatment cohorts. Even once we identify the variations, we still need to develop particularized treatments. It requires a tremendous shift in how medicine has been practiced. I think that's what 23andMe was hoping to bootstrap, and why they're not shy about sharing their database with researchers.

Moving from traditional medicine to individual treatment will be done incrementally--splitting what was once a monolithic group into ever smaller subgroups until, eventually, centuries from now, everyone receives tailored treatment. SNPs can still be useful because we're still transitioning from treating monolithic groups, so the variations missed by SNPs are details that we would be unable to leverage, anyhow. The state-of-the-art is always light years ahead of what we can manage to operationalize at scale. Isn't this the lesson so many startups have to learn? On the ground, the real value add always comes in figuring out to make some new technique useful and profitable, and for various reasons it's usually the case that the techniques are already ancient by the time they see substantial use in the market.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#192

Post by jamesrcole »

some-guy wrote: post #126
neivin wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't buy the test because all it would say would be "Congrats! You are 100% asian." I feel like 23&me is literally only useful/interesting to white people because they can see which one of the 50 European countries they have ties to. It's not that useful for me. I've had friends do it and get 99.97% Chinese or Indian. Amazing, I could have told you that for free.

As a 3rd generation white person in the US, what specific European ancestry I have is meaningless to me. I find the health tests to be more interesting than the ancestry, though it was a bit scary though having to click through all the warnings to get to the results.

> what specific [ancestry] I have is meaningless to me.

it's ultimately probably not important, but I would think that it's at least something to be curious about.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#193

Post by johntiger1 »

evv555 wrote: post #130
zyang wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did it 6/7 years ago because the novelty, and enthusiastically recommended it to family and friends. Now I regret doing it considering how Google and Facebook has abused consumer data. I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate.

>I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate. You already have since your DNA is out there in a database.

That's not exactly how DNA works. Their kids should be mostly fine (99.99% similar is still night and day)

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#194

Post by JacobAldridge »

I happily share my income and net worth figures online, post here and everywhere using my real name, and I’m even doing a podcast now sharing all the gory details of going through fertility treatment from the male perspective.

There’s no way in the world I would allow a company, or any other person or entity, to voluntarily have my DNA.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#195

Post by gmassman »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #88
jsgo wrote: post #79

> Wojcicki has theories Think the obvious one is that the results are shared and whether someone is a criminal or not (or will be one in the future), people are not particularly comfortable with sharing to parties they didn't initially trust it to for the purposes they trusted it for. Anecdotally, I bought a 23andme kit (just the genealogy one) but never submitted it because the labeling was to send it to the lab in…

When 23andme first started they were offering that a sample and your data could be destroyed whenever you liked. Then they got bought and their erasure document is a disgrace, their default position is they can't delete your genetic data and they don't say a thing about the sample at all. Those were not the terms under which it was collected. There is a reason their business is failing and its because of this enormou…

I just sent in my spit last week and I thought they were very transparent about their data protections. They allow for you to delete your data and deny access by third parties, albeit they require 30 days to process any changes. I'm interested in learning more about my heritage, as well as contributing to genetics research. Maybe their terms have changed over time, but overall I found their explanations to be clear and thorough.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#196

Post by nordsieck »

laurencerowe wrote: post #175
nordsieck wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This changes the odds of inheriting none of your mother's Scottish dominoes from 1 in a million (2^20) to 1 in 512 (2^9). That may be true for mom, but conservatively, there's between a 1-in-100 and 1-in-20 odds of inheriting none of your father's dominoes.

What's the mechanism at play here? Each chromosome pair is one from the father and one from the mother.

> What's the mechanism at play here?

cheating

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#197

Post by nradov »

PunchTornado wrote: post #121
avocado4 wrote: post #80

23andme testing is one and done. Once you've had it you will never spend a dime with them. It's a red flag for any investor.

their data could be very valuable depending on the evolution of personal medicine.

Their existing data can't really be used for personalized medicine. If they want to pursue that market they'll need different testing protocols and additional regulatory approvals.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#198

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

ilamont wrote: post #55
ThrowawayH4MCb wrote: post #47

Current, unaffected employee here. Throwaway for obvious reasons. A big chunk of the layoff is the new lab that we built in Phoenix. That only made economic sense in the scenario where we were selling far more kits than we succeeded in selling. The rest of the layoffs have a similar root cause: a massive overestimate of how much we were going to sell. I'd blame the shortfall on some combination of growing privacy con…

Ancestry.com has also stepped up its marketing game. Used to be a follower with DNA, now a leader, and discounting heavily. And, unlike 23andMe which got rid of family tree tools used by genealogists, Ancestry still has a very strong suite of trees and traditional genealogy tools. Some people really want to have both genetic and traditional genealogy accounts under the same provider, and are either unaware or don't r…

Just tried to buy a kit, their checkout page after creating an account is blocked because it's trying to load a flash object.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#199

Post by dekhn »

wahern wrote: post #191
dekhn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Researchers talk a big game, but genomics has turned out to be a massive disappointment and really oversold. SNP analysis is useful, but leaves out a lot of important variation. Also, it's taken the field a long time to understand that most interesting phenotypes are complex nonlinear functions of many different variations, which makes health discovery far more challenging.

> SNP analysis is useful, but leaves out a lot of important variation That's true of everything in medicine, especially without SNP analysis. And it'll remain true even with whole genome sequencing. I think the biggest problem is that until now medicine has revolved around the study and treatment cohorts. Even once we identify the variations, we still need to develop particularized treatments. It requires a tremendou…

There are far more important things to work on than personalized medicine. All personalized medicine would do, in the near term, is make medicine more expensive.

Finding better candidates for clinical trials, and then running better clinical trials are the two biggest things that have a positive impact.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#200

Post by nradov »

michaelmior wrote: post #101
nradov wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not quite true. Your DNA doesn't change, but 23andMe only does partial sequences on those test kits. As new techniques become available they can't necessarily retest old samples, so customers who want more complete results in the future will likely have to buy and submit new kits.

This is true but unrelated to their current decline in sales since this isn't an option they currently offer.

It is an option they currently offer.

https://you.23andme.com/chip-upgrade/

Post reply on HN