My Geneticist dot com
A while back, I received an email from a company called mygeneticist.com that is doing genetic testing to help patients identify adverse drug reactions. I'm not sure what the relationship is, but they seem to be a part of something called DiscoverMe technologies. I bring mygeneticist up, because I had an "interview" with one of their partners, to determine if I am a good subject for their genetic testing program. It seems I'm too healthy to be included, unless they later decide to include me as a control. Nuts-it! (I'm still trying to figure out how to get my genome sequenced here at the GSC too, but I don't think anyone wants to fund that...)
At any rate, I spoke with the representative of their clinical side of operations this morning and had an interesting conversation about my background. In typical fashion, I also took the time to ask a few specific questions about their operations. I'm pretty sure they didn't tell me much more than was available on their various web pages, but I think there was some interesting information that came out of it.
When I originally read their email, I had assumed that they were going to be doing WTSS on each of their patients. At about $8000 per patient, it's expensive, but a relatively cheap form of discovery - if you can get around some of the challenges involved in tissue selection, etc. Instead, it seems that they're doing specific gene interrogation, although I wasn't able to get the type of platform their using. This leads me to believe that they're probably doing some form of literature check for genes related to the drugs of interest, followed by a PCR or Array based validation across their patient group. Considering the challenges of associating drug reactions with SNPs and genomic variation, I would be very curious to see what they have planned for "value-added" resources. Any drug company can find out (and probably does already know) what's in the literature, and any genetic testing done without approval from the FDA will probaby be sued/litigated/regulated out of existance... which doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for them.
And that lead me to thinking about a lot of other questions, which went un-asked. (I'll probably email the Genomics expert there to ask some questions, though I'm mostly interested in the business side of it, which they probably won't answer.) What makes them think that people will pay for their services? How can they charge a low-enough fee to make the service attractive while getting making a profit? And, from the scientific side, assuming they're not just a diagnostic application company, I'm not sure how they'll get a large enough cohort to make sense of the data they receive through their recruitment strategy.
Anyhow, I'll be keeping my eyes on this company - if they're still around in a year or two, I'd be very interested in talking to them again about their plans in the next-generation sequencing field.
At any rate, I spoke with the representative of their clinical side of operations this morning and had an interesting conversation about my background. In typical fashion, I also took the time to ask a few specific questions about their operations. I'm pretty sure they didn't tell me much more than was available on their various web pages, but I think there was some interesting information that came out of it.
When I originally read their email, I had assumed that they were going to be doing WTSS on each of their patients. At about $8000 per patient, it's expensive, but a relatively cheap form of discovery - if you can get around some of the challenges involved in tissue selection, etc. Instead, it seems that they're doing specific gene interrogation, although I wasn't able to get the type of platform their using. This leads me to believe that they're probably doing some form of literature check for genes related to the drugs of interest, followed by a PCR or Array based validation across their patient group. Considering the challenges of associating drug reactions with SNPs and genomic variation, I would be very curious to see what they have planned for "value-added" resources. Any drug company can find out (and probably does already know) what's in the literature, and any genetic testing done without approval from the FDA will probaby be sued/litigated/regulated out of existance... which doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for them.
And that lead me to thinking about a lot of other questions, which went un-asked. (I'll probably email the Genomics expert there to ask some questions, though I'm mostly interested in the business side of it, which they probably won't answer.) What makes them think that people will pay for their services? How can they charge a low-enough fee to make the service attractive while getting making a profit? And, from the scientific side, assuming they're not just a diagnostic application company, I'm not sure how they'll get a large enough cohort to make sense of the data they receive through their recruitment strategy.
Anyhow, I'll be keeping my eyes on this company - if they're still around in a year or two, I'd be very interested in talking to them again about their plans in the next-generation sequencing field.
Labels: Bioinformatics, biology, General Musings, SNPS
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