Re:How Anne Wojcicki’s 23andMe Will Mine Its Giant DNA Database
by epistasis on Saturday June 08, 2019 @10:30AM
(#20132574)
There's a lot of churn in that market of startups doing it and stopping doing it.
The scientific community has already created all the tough parts of the software stack, and everything has been commoditized already, there's just not much of a customer base.
The customers that it's really really useful for are those with rare phenotypes that want to learn more, and they can't find a doctor with expertise, and there's no lab specialized in genetic testing for that.
However, those are also the cases where the off the shelf software/sequencing doesn't always give the right answer because it's not a simple small change, and then you need specialists both on the biology and bioinformatics side to really make it useful.
The scientific community has already created all the tough parts of the software stack, and everything has been commoditized already, there's just not much of a customer base.
The customers that it's really really useful for are those with rare phenotypes that want to learn more, and they can't find a doctor with expertise, and there's no lab specialized in genetic testing for that.
However, those are also the cases where the off the shelf software/sequencing doesn't always give the right answer because it's not a simple small change, and then you need specialists both on the biology and bioinformatics side to really make it useful.