Posted on 08/03/2018 5:06:48 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
LONDON (Reuters) - How much is your DNA worth? As millions of people pay for home tests to check on ancestry or health risks, genetic data is becoming an increasingly valuable resource for drugmakers, triggering a race to create a DNA marketplace.
GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK.L) decision to invest $300 million in 23andMe and forge an exclusive drug development deal with the Silicon Valley consumer genetics company crystallizes the value locked up in genetic code.
The tie-up is the biggest yet involving home DNA testing, a market dominated by 23andMe and Ancestry.com, which charge under $100 for a saliva-based test, but can also gain voluntary consent from customers for their data to be used by third parties.
However a number of new start-ups are beginning to offer people the chance to own their genetic information and sell it to data-hungry drug researchers.
Firms like EncrypGen, Nebula Genomics, LunaDNA and Zenome are using blockchain - the technology behind Bitcoin - to secure sensitive DNA records and create a transaction ledger. The new players all have slightly different models, with most simply provide data platforms, where people are rewarded for providing data, although Nebula also plans to offer testing.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Never trust these DNA people.
All I got to say is that I sent my spit into 23&Me and when it came back not one bit of Native American dna......my great grandmother was full blooded Choctaw Indian. I showed my brother the results and he looked at me with a weird look on his face and said “what? Momma Black isn’t our great grandmother?” I laughed and then showed it a little later to my aunt and she basically said the same thing.....I’ve decided that 23&M and Ancestry.com are a joke......if I didn’t know for a fact that my great grandmother was full blooded Indian I guess I would have accepted the results without question.....
Here’s the thing, your DNA ultimately can only really attest to just two things: your exclusive paternal heritable and your exclusive maternal heritage.
You dad’s mom and your mom’s dad and all their people will not show up in a simple test. Your dad’s dad’s mom won’t either. And so forth.
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