23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

Re:23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline by kevinstubbs on Thursday January 23, 2020 @06:05PM (#22133292)

Very curious that this came just a couple weeks after they announced licensing their first drug compound (using data from the test kits?) to the Spanish firm Almirall [0,1].

Anybody have any ideas about this? Why would they slow down the "growth and scaling efforts" (as the cnbc article claims) even despite lower-than expected sales, when the data from kits is what gives them the unique(?) capability to discover novel drug compounds at a massively reduced cost compared to traditional pharma companies.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-09/23andme-l...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22004326

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Re:23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline by ThrowawayH4MCb on Thursday January 23, 2020 @08:23PM (#22134442)

Bringing drugs to market requires a lot of money. And the whole process takes a long time (order of a decade).

Subsidizing the tests or doing more marketing would sell more tests, but wouldn't speed up drug development. And doing so would burn up money that could be used for drug development.

And even though the licensing deal is promising, there has been no drug brought to market yet based on 23andMe's data. So it's a hard sell to investors.

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