navigenics
dgmacarthur | May 20, 2010The brief Golden Age of direct-to-consumer genetic testing - in which people could freely gain access to their own genetic information without a doctor's permission - may be about to draw to a close. In a dramatic week, announcements of investigations into direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies by both the FDA and the US Congress have sent the personal genomics industry into a spin, and it is still impossible to say exactly which way it will be pointing once the confusion passes.
I've been frustratingly unable to find the time to cover the developments as they happened due to other…
dgmacarthur | November 15, 2009Added in edit: for superb analysis of the announcement from multiple angles, you should also check out Dan Vorhaus' three incisive articles on Genomics Law Report.
Personal genomics company 23andMe announced yesterday on its blog (and in an email to customers) of impending changes to its product line. Until now 23andMe has offered only two products: its $399 full scan, and a $99 Research Revolution product that offers limited functionality and a focus on common disease risk prediction.
There are two major components of the altered product line. Firstly, customers will now be able to…
dgmacarthur | October 7, 2009Four scientists - including the omnipresent J. Craig Venter (left) - have penned an opinion piece in the latest issue of Nature based results from five individuals genotyped by two separate personal genomics companies. The article highlights some deficiencies in the way that genetic data are currently used by direct-to-consumer companies to generate risk predictions and to present them to customers.
The identity of the tested individuals isn't made explicit in the article, except to note that there were two males and two females from the same family and one unrelated female. All of the…
dgmacarthur | June 11, 2009The buzz leading up to this week's Consumer Genetics Show in Boston suggested that a major announcement would be made by the CEO of genomics technology provider Illumina, Jay Flatley. Illumina provides the most popular second-generation sequencing instrument currently on the market, the Genome Analyzer II, and has been making noises about moving into the personal genomics industry since at least the beginning of the year, so the announcement itself was not exactly a shock: Illumina is launching a personal genome sequencing service.
The launch comes with a new website, the appealingly titled…
dgmacarthur | February 20, 2009A reader pointed me to this article on the collaborative research project between personal genomics company Navigenics and the Scripps Translational Science Institute. The project aimed to recruit 10,000 people from among employees and patients of Scripps Health and their family and friends. Recruits will receive data from a Navigenics genome scan at a subsidised price of $470, compared to the normal commercial price of $2,500.
The bad news: despite the dramatic price reduction, the project has only succeeded in recruiting 4,000 participants - just 40% of the original goal. Recruitment ends…
dgmacarthur | February 2, 2009Helix Health's Steve Murphy rather breathlessly announces the launch of the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative website (for the uninitiated: you can tell Steve is really excited when he uses five exclamation marks at the end of a sentence rather than four.)
To be fair, it is big news. Coriell is offering a free service - a full genome scan, plus a genetic health report and genetic counselling - that would cost you at least $500 from Navigenics. The pay-off to them is a massive database to mine for new gene-disease associations and information about patient responses to genetic…
dgmacarthur | January 28, 2009Nearly five months after 23andMe dropped the price of its genome scan service from $1000 to $400, personal genomics competitor Navigenics has made its own foray into the lower-cost genetic testing market.
Navigenics has always been the most expensive of the three mainstream genome-scan companies, despite offering essentially the same product as competitors 23andMe and deCODEme: a genome scan examining between 500,000 and a million sites of common genetic variation, known as SNPs. While its competitors charge a one-off fee of $400 (23andMe) or $1,000 (deCODEme), Navigenics whacks its customers…
dgmacarthur | January 27, 2009Misha Angrist passes on a call from Case Western University for personal genomics customers to participate in a study of the experience of getting your genome scanned. If you've paid money to 23andMe, deCODEme or Navigenics, consider getting involved - Misha assures us that the process was relatively painless.
By the way, if you happen to be that most elusive of creatures - a happy customer of Navigenics - Drew Yates has been waiting to hear from you for a long time.
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dgmacarthur | January 19, 2009Well, it's a little late, but I finally have a list of what I see as some of the major trends that will play out in the human genomics field in 2009 - both in terms of research outcomes, and shifts in the rapidly-evolving consumer genomics industry.
For genetics-savvy readers a lot of these predictions may seem, well, predictable, so I want to emphasise that my purpose here is not really to make risky forecasts; I'm more interested in laying out what I see as the major big picture trends for the year to come, with a few specific predictions about unknowns thrown in. In any case (as you will…
dgmacarthur | January 13, 2009Following the dramatic appearance of the field of personal genomics just over a year ago the major players in the field have worked hard to distinguish themselves from their competition: 23andMe has emphasised the intellectual joy of learning about genetics, and also attempted to actively engage its customers in the company's research projects; deCODEme has leaned heavily on the impressive academic credentials of its parent company, deCODE Genetics; Navigenics has committed itself utterly to an image of sober, responsible reflection on the medical information present in its customers' genomes…
dgmacarthur | December 18, 2008Nature has a list of the top news stories of 2008, and "Personal genomics goes mainstream" comes up second:
In January, an international consortium announced the launch of the 1,000 Genomes Project, which aims to provide a catalogue of human genetic variation. In October, the Personal Genome Project, which hopes to sequence and publish the genomes of as many people as possible, released initial data for ten participants. Meanwhile, as researchers wondered what they could glean from the results coming from personal-genomics companies, the prices of such services dropped. The firm 23andMe,…
dgmacarthur | October 14, 2008Navigenics has announced in the industry publication In Sequence (subscription only) that it plans to add gene sequencing to its personal genomics service. This would make it the first of the "Big Three" personal genomics companies (Navigenics, 23andMe and deCODEme) to offer analysis of rare as well as common genetic variants.
The move into sequencing has always been inevitable for the personal genomics industry. Currently all three of the major players in the affordable personal genomics field (as opposed to Knome's high-end service) use chip-based technology to analyse up to a million…