23andme is Shaking up Clinical Research

It is coming.

Yes, 23andme is challenging the traditional way we are conducting clinical trials. In a press release today, 23andme is announcing a partnership with the the Parkinson's Institute to discover genetic and environmental factors of Parkinson's disease.

Six months ago, my colleagues and I send out a grant proposal arguing the potential efficiencies of combining consumer genomics with clinical trials. Although I am frustrated to learn a week ago that our proposal was not funded, I am very happy to see the press release today from 23andme, which essentially validated our proposal.

On a separate note, the Wall Street Journal reports today on a shortage of participation in cancer clinical trails, especially minority groups.

Bottlenecks of Traditional Clinical Trials	23andme's Innovative Solutions
Patient recruiting	Social network
Cost of SNP scans	May do cost-sharing with participants

Similar to the early days of sequencing and bioinformatics development, I would expect to see the industry driving the innovative applications, instead of the academics.

There are "2.0" hypes on everything recently, including the "Research 2.0" in the press release. Even though there are a lot of details to be worked out, I am still very positive on it.

Another Player Joined the Personal Genomics Craze

Announced January 24, 2008, SeqWright, a Houston, TX company, joined the recent craze of personal genomics by offering a DNA test to consumers at $998.

Another player joins the "23etAl" craze!

My friend at BioTeam -- Michael Cariaso, who is also the author of the well known SNPedia, coined a word "23atAl". I like Michael's creation!

"23atAl" describes the companies of 23andme, Navigenics, deCODEme, Knome and alike, who are trying to provide consumers with genotying service.

The information provided by SeqWright is cursory. My instinct tells me that they are using Affymetrix SNP arrays. If so, it will be a direct competitor to Navigenics.

A distinctive feature of the SeqWright offering is the copy number variation analysis. So far as I know, it is the first one providing this information to consumers, although we use it regularly in research as a by-product of running SNP arrays.

A quick update: Blogger Daniel MacArthur (his Genetic Future blog here) also created an interesting word play, "me two": 23andMe and deCODEme.