How valuable is the big data in the biological field?

Recently, Genentech, a leading pharmaceutical company, injected $60 million into 23andMe to share genomic data from the latter's patients with Parkinson's disease.

I've had more than 6 reports of this gene technology company, and I can look here, here, here, here, here and here. Well, the reason why we care so much about this company may be that one of its co-founder, Anne Wojcicki, is the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. ）。 Many of the girls (and female teachers) around me were envious that she had a rich husband who could pay for his own experiments.

On the other, 23andMe is a good company, and Anne Wojcicki is also considered a good scientist. But genetic technology involves human privacy and ethical issues that make many researchers headache, leading to 23andMe business that is not as smooth as it might think.

In November 13, the FDA halted 23andMe health-related data interpretation services, although this meant consumers could still read the data to knowledgeable practitioners, a ban that did "slow the growth of our new customers".

As a cash-burning company, 23andMe's last big investment was 50 million dollars raised in 12 from Google, Facebook shareholder Yuri Milner. With huge inflows of capital, 23andMe now has a huge genetic database. Unlike Google and Facebook, Genentech, a world-class pharmaceutical company, recently unexpectedly generously donated 10 million dollars for the advance, followed by a 50 million dollar investment-especially at a time when 23andMe seemed to be at a low ebb.

Anne Wojcicki that it was 23andMe's data that attracted investment from drug companies, "which illustrates the fact that drug companies are interested in the vast amount of information we have." We have a large number of people who want to participate in the study, and we can do more quickly and effectively than any other research method in the world.

Apparently Genentech did, too, and Alex Schuth, who was in charge of the technology innovation and diagnostics business, was shocked by the 12,000 patients recruited by 23andMe and Michael J. Fox Foundation and the data. "It is clear that such cooperation will be the best way to develop new drugs for patients," he said. ”

Interestingly, Genentech was not the first to cooperate with drug companies in the 23andMe, and last year they worked with Pfizer on a study of Crohn's disease, a cause of unexplained intestinal inflammation.

But the latest investment sets out the size and strength of 23andMe's existing database, and Genentech will use one of the big databases: The Parkinson's disease database. The 23andMe diagnostic service involved only those genetic mutations known to science, and Genentech wanted to go further, and they wanted to get the whole genome sequence information of 3,000 patients with Parkinson's disease or their first-degree relatives. Genentech to dig up new drug targets.

Apart from the privacy protection and ethical issues that the partnership is bound to involve, Anne Wojcicki has to seek to improve its relationship with the FDA, which she hopes will increase the number of users from 800,000 to 1 million. So she hired genomic Tiyatien former employee Kathy Hibbs to be in charge of public relations.

Anne Wojcicki hopes everything will go well in 2015, especially with the FDA approving data interpretation services again. Because if this information is considered to be of little value, the company will face an uncertain future.

Even so, the 23andMe database is still popular: a San Francisco company named Reset Therapeutics is using their databases to find drug targets to treat rare diseases.

Eventually, the 23andMe still needs to expand their database, but it seems to be waiting. As early as Anne Wojcicki founded 23andMe, a friend of a large drug company cautioned that if she really wanted to do something extraordinary, at least 10 years, until the FDA defined what was a direct consumer-oriented business. Otherwise, she had to change a strategy to sell the company as early as she could. Anne Wojcicki that the need for a long line.

While it appears that the FDA will not relax its regulation of 23andMe in the short term, I believe that 23andMe has done what it is supposed to do, that they are more efficient than research institutions and hospitals, and that they provide informative data to researchers or companies that are limited by their financial resources. The FDA should be more effective, faster. Develop policies that guarantee privacy information and ethical norms, and less bureaucracy.