The board of directors of 23andMe just resigned in protest. The CEO, Anne Wojcicki (who's sister Susan died of lung cancer last month, and was the former CEO of YouTube) had tried to low ball take the company private at only $0.40 a share -- a more than 96% drop from its deSPAC price.
For reference, right now the market cap of 23andMe is $172 million, its closest competitor Ancestry.com was bought out by the Blackstone group for $4.7 billion, and cumulative sales of KeyTruda - an anti-cancer drug in the same family as the one being developed by 23andMe had cumulative sales of $25 billion by 2023.
Feels like the main thing holding this company back is the CEO and lack of corporate governance (due to majority shareholder control resting in the hands of one person)
Closest competitor does a lot of heavy lifting in this situation. Ancestry is the overwhelming leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space. Look at https://www.ancestry.com/ and https://www.23andme.com/
23andme has basically given up on this part of the business.
Their pitch is health. But that pitch is murky with no good hook to keep you hooked for a monthly subscription. So after they get the initial $99 from the customer, most of the value customer is going to get is already served up in the first report. Maybe their big database will turn into making cancer drugs but maybe it wont.
> 23andme has basically given up on this part of the business.
The routine emails I get about them allegedly finding new DNA relatives suggest otherwise. The DNA relatives feature is also still pretty prominent in their UI (at least on desktop browsers; haven't looked at the app yet).
That said, it certainly doesn't offer much beyond "these are your relatives; send 'em some messages or something lol". Ancestry probably has a lot more features on that front, which is unsurprising since that's the sort of thing Ancestry was doing long before they even offered DNA sequencing kits like 23andMe does. I don't know if I'd characterize that as 23andMe "giving up", though; more that it's good enough for a product that never intended to enter the genealogy software market in the first place.
> leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space.
Acknowledging Ancestry.com are well ahead of the market here, but I never got their appeal of finding some long-lost second cousins... basically strangers, and saying, "hey, isn't it fascinating that we share some arbitrary level of common genetic makeup". If some randomer reached out via email to me doing this big reveal I'd be "thanks, but into the spam folder with you".
It's sad that we have come to a point where people frown upon a company that makes a product and sells it, without luring their customers in with monthly subscriptions.
I’m on mobile and too lazy to check, but is ancestry.com related in any way to Jehovah’a Witnesses? I’m asking because at some point I was online searching for any info about the Russian Imperial census held at the end the 1890s and, to my surprise, the JW website had all the info in there (or at least almost all the info on the region I was interested in, Kherson). And then I found out that this sort of stuff is right down JW’s alley for some religion-related reason, good for them.
To complete the data, the company is trading at $0.34/share, so while $0.40 is a bit lower than the typical 20% premium (~$0.41), I'm not sure it counts as "lowball". It's a typical premium over market cap.
Is there any reason to think the company is worth $4.7B or whatever ($9.30/share)? If so the stock is a steal at its current price and we should all buy lots. But can the market be THAT wrong?
Yes. The market can be THAT wrong, not just wrong but also corrupt and broken (on purpose).
Hint: regulatory crisis, Suzanne Trimbath, failure to deliver shares, naked shorting, Tesla shortsqueeze, VW shortsqueeze, UBS's and Swiss gov's 50 year secret, etc.
I stand corrected. Well maybe the board took a day to get together and draft the letter. One of the board members Neal Mohan has to stand before a judge in Google's current anti-trust trial. No doubt he has no time for this stuff.
If the board is resigning, and the company is selling DNA kits, running a telemedicine operation, selling pharmceuticals online AND developing cancer drugs at a 180 million dollar market cap...
Anne's plan from the very beginning was to capitalize on the value of the human genome in drug development and medical testing. Frankly everything you need to know about the idea behind the company before its various pitfalls and pivots is here (2007): https://web.archive.org/web/20140312001152/http://www.wired....
(sorry, it takes a while to load but wired has killed most of their long-term links)
IMHO she and Avey were just naive about the actual science and business of using genomic information for drug discovery. Remember, around the time the company started, the human genome had only recently been sequenced and Craig Venter was trying to capitalize on that, and lots of folks figured it would quickly turn into a multi-billion dollar market.
On the other hand, the product is quite good at finding relatives (identity by descent) and to be honest I wish they'd run 23&me as just that service, without the medical angle. My father did 23&Me mainly to figure out more about his ancestry, but also it helped a number of children conceived via IVF (he had provided a sample for fertility testing many years before) identify and contact him (I can't even imagine what the experience was like; to me, it's just a bunch of half-siblings I didn't know about)
Yes, but the CEO was trying to take those profits for herself by biding to take the company private, which the Board of Directors refused to put up with
Phase 2 is not a slam dunk. Much more work remains, and under the guidance of a CEO who has zero drug development experience and a track record of management incompetence:
- lying about growth
- pushing out the cofounder
- never making a profit
- hack that went undiscovered for months
About the only area she's had success is raising money and that's in large part thanks to being a member of the Silicon Valley elite.
in some cases the value doesn't really exist. if someone owns 75% of a company from the founding, and they sell 25% for $100000 then its worth $400000 in a valuation whether the starting capital was $1000000 or $1
selling the smallest amount of share possible for the highest amount you can get can easily balloon the "paper" value of a company, but that money doesn't really exist anywhere.
it will change when things go public, but often the initial price is based on some vapourous guess like this...
The plan was always that DNA could be use for medical research, which is enormously valuable.
And given that 23andme currently has a market cap 1/20th DJT (Trump Media & Technology Group Corp) -- a firm that makes less revenue than a variety store yet has huge losses -- I wouldn't really say it's "worth so much".
"closest competitor" really doesn't mean anything here. That's like calling a failing burger joint in a random US city a "competitor of McDonalds". No they're not.
> Feels like the main thing holding this company back is the CEO
Use has also dropped, no? There's serious questions about long term revenue generation. Ancestry.com doesn't require selling your genetic code to collaborate on geneology.
Virtually impossible as Anne Wojcicki holds 20% of the outstanding shares and 49% of the voting power of total outstanding shares. That's essentially dictator-level power over the company. I believe the next largest shareholder is Richard Branson. Source: https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
Despite the promising drug development news, the CEO signaled last month that she was willing to let public investors get hosed, with a low ball take-private offer of $0.40/share. I believe this pissed both public investors and the board members off. I'm not sure if the positive phase 2 results were icing on the cake.
Quite honestly this company is a ripe target for acquisition by a biopharma company like GSK or Roche.
So sad that Blackstone bought ancestry.. newspapers.com is a really nice tool for researchers (and most things that get touched by PE end up enshittified)
There is absolutely no reason for these companies to collect your PII whatsoever. You should go to nearest pharmacy and buy sterile swab, swab yourself and write long random number on it and send it. Once a month company publishes one giant zip with all the monthly result where you find your file by that random number you wrote.
Your genetic data is probably most accurate / valuable PII there is. Assuming multiple relatives use the service and at least one of them leaks online identity the whole jig is up.
So the issue is not tying it to your online identity, but rather them keeping a resource which becomes more valuable as the time goes on. So why is that an issue... most obviously because of genetic predisposition. There is always a temptation to sell diseases you are predisposed to insurers (and maybe employers... ugh). After that you can imagine someone figuring that genetics affects any number of things (sugar / weight / addiction) and sell that to advertisers...
How would that avoid PII? One assumes there would need to be an email address to recover that account, and that would likely link to every single detail about the owner.
Unless you are suggesting they publish the most PII there is, you should propably specify that the data they should publish should be aggregated non-identifying information next to the number, not the actual DNa strings.
Are you kidding? The CIA would never fund that and if such a company existed, the founder would probably end up going for a 130 MPH drive at 2 AM and getting in a crash that burned so hot nothing but ash remained.
Something I just remembered about this company: after a data breach, they tried retroactively changing ToS to shield from lawsuits
Frankly I find this lack of accountability utterly repulsive. Anything this leadership touches is poison to me
> Through a mechanism called acceptance by silence or inaction, 23andMe stipulated that customers must explicitly tell the company they disagree with the new terms within 30 days of being notified of the changes or they will be locked into the terms automatically.
> After the attack, hackers published around 1 million data points about users with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and information about more than 300,000 users with Chinese heritage.
I think data-breaches could carry the death penalty for companies.
I just got a notification from some health services company that my and my toddlers data was accessed. Including medical history, diagnoses, payment details, SSN, birthday. Why was this not encrypted? Given the world today, this is negligent. The government should be able to disolve the company and give the money to the victims.
If there was a willful disregard for "common security and privacy standards", criminal charges against the executive team.
You want my personal life data? It comes with steep personal risk.
My HSA emailed me and said “woopsies, we leaked all your data”.
And…? You’re going to try and give me credit monitoring when I literally have 2 overlapping credit monitoring offers from the other companies that leaked my data?
> The government should be able to disolve the company and give the money to the victims
I feel you, but my understanding is without clear monetary impact, its hard to collect any amount of money from these companies. Even if you experience identity theft, whose to say this vs one of the other data leaks was the issue.
To those wondering why the quotes are given, I assume it's because no 23andMe system was compromised.
The data was retrieved via credential stuffing, which is trying username/email and password combinations from other data breaches.
It can be argued that 23andMe should have had stricter login requirements (e.g. require MFA, require longer passwords) and by failing to do so they were responsible for the leaked data. Or you can argue that the users didn't protect their own data since they didn't use long, secure passwords that were unique per website.
I want to get my genetic data, but, like obviously I don't want to go through one of these services where they ingest all that data and keep it around forever. Honestly, I'd like to be the only person with access to it and I can destroy it at will.
Tough requirements, I know.
Anyways, do you know of any services that meet those reqs? Any good DIY ideas?
I didn't follow competitors too closely, but Color may be what you're looking for. I don't know if they sell direct to consumer though.
If you use 23andMe, and request data deletion, they will do a best effort to delete the data. It's part of their GDPR requirement. When I was there, I worked on this project and they put a lot of effort into it. A big chunk of engineering org focused GDPR compliance for a month or two. They definitely don't intentionally keep data around if you request deletion.
The one caveat is that data deletion is hard, and its possible that some gets accidentally retained. I left the company over 5 years ago, so I don't know how good their deletion process is now.
One final note: to keep costs low, 23andMe doesn't look at your whole genome. They only look at a handful of "SNPs" in your genome that are known to be significant. If you've heard how we share 99.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, this is what they're basing this on. They look at the <0.5% of DNA that commonly varies between humans.
The reason I mention this is that, if you're very interested in your DNA sequencing, you may want to opt for a higher cost service that does full genome analysis. I don't know any names but I believe there are some DNA services that do this.
Not directly, afaik they never transferred the data.
However they sold access to the data to a bug pharma company (GSK). This was widely publicized. Not sure if that counts: GSK had some ability to look at the data but didn’t have an on premise copy of it.
Also, I worked on the GDPR deletion project. I can attest that they do best effort to delete your data when your request that. At least when I was there, this was the case. One caveat is for coding errors, oversights and bugs.
No, generally not. 23andMe only ever did ISOs prior to the SPAC merger, not RSUs, and they had a quite high strike price. There was a 6 month insider lock up against selling, so by the time most of us could sell, the price had tanked. By the time I was able to sell, the share price was so low that only my oldest options from when I started at the company in 2014 were in the money.
I ended up making a few 10s of thousands. Not the 100s it would have taken to compensate for the low pay for all those years. And I probably did better than most by selling what I could when I could. Most people weren't in the money at all.
Maybe if you timed the market perfectly you could have done well. I don't know that anyone did.
Was there an internal sense that the business model was flawed? You can only sell so many DNA tests to people, and the pharma research angle always felt like more of a pipe dream than a viable business.
The company bet heavily on pharma/genomics, and it was a bad bet.
When I was there, people were pretty confident in this bet. They had just signed a huge deal with GSK, so it seemed to be going well. There wasn't widespread dissent at the time (~2016-2017). I imagine its different now that the stock price has crashed over 10x.
The company did follow Ancestry.com pretty closely. Ancestry did not bet heavily on genomics. Instead, they bet heavily on a subscription model and focused more on consumer interest in their ancestors. This has worked out a lot better for them than 23andMe.
FWIW, I agree it's obvious in retrospect that pharma was a bad bet. Leadership should have made better decisions.
As usual: “It depends’. Data on gene variants related to the first steps in drug metabolism can be quite useful both at home and clinically—e.g, your own responses to ethanol, caffeine, and many over-the-counter and prescribed drugs.
St Jude Children’s Research Hospital routinely genotypes/sequences children before drug treatments to optimize initial doses. It makes a huge difference in outcomes for most cancer patients.
But chronic age-related diseases that older individuals care about most are too complicated and too strongly affected by environmental factors to be well predicted by low coverage sequencing or genotyping platforms. Even deep sequencing and perfect telomere-to-telomere personal genome assemblies (still about a $10,000 to 20,000 effort) will not be sufficient. You really need the patient’s full history and deep omics data. Michael P Snyder and colleagues at Stanford are getting close to this type of “future preventive health care” with a focus on type 2 diabetes.
Polygenic risk scores based in simple GWAS results and additive genetic models are uninformative (or minimally useful) wrt clinical care for complex diseases—even those that have moderate heritability. There are simple way too many variables, too many undefined gene-by-environmental effects, and too many non-additive effects (epistasis). Polygenic risk scores typically account for less than 20% of variance in disease traits.
Coming around full circle though—-these platforms ARE useful for pharmacogenetic predictions of initial metabolic processing of drugs—- getting us closer to the right dose the first time.
And the SNP genotypes generated by 23andMe are also valuable predictors for a subset of variants that contribute to nearly monogenic disorders.
Just for some perspective from outside the US: I work at a bank in a country subject to GDPR. I have access to customer data, as do most people on my team.
The company was not very well run so I’m not surprised. Their stock price has tanked over 10x since IPO, and it dropped by half in the employee lockout period after IPO.
A little trivia: since the recent 23andMe breach, the desci project genomesdao has launched a new service that allows 23andMe data exports to be imported into their platform. They then attract pharmaceuticals to make specific requests and share the profit from the requests. They'll explain it better on the site! They've been around since at least 2018, have won recognised innovation awards and is run by scientists, so not your typical crypto project.
Disclaimer: 23andMe customer and genomesdao holder.
Readit News
The board of directors of 23andMe just resigned in protest. The CEO, Anne Wojcicki (who's sister Susan died of lung cancer last month, and was the former CEO of YouTube) had tried to low ball take the company private at only $0.40 a share -- a more than 96% drop from its deSPAC price.
For reference, right now the market cap of 23andMe is $172 million, its closest competitor Ancestry.com was bought out by the Blackstone group for $4.7 billion, and cumulative sales of KeyTruda - an anti-cancer drug in the same family as the one being developed by 23andMe had cumulative sales of $25 billion by 2023.
Feels like the main thing holding this company back is the CEO and lack of corporate governance (due to majority shareholder control resting in the hands of one person)
Their pitch is health. But that pitch is murky with no good hook to keep you hooked for a monthly subscription. So after they get the initial $99 from the customer, most of the value customer is going to get is already served up in the first report. Maybe their big database will turn into making cancer drugs but maybe it wont.
The routine emails I get about them allegedly finding new DNA relatives suggest otherwise. The DNA relatives feature is also still pretty prominent in their UI (at least on desktop browsers; haven't looked at the app yet).
That said, it certainly doesn't offer much beyond "these are your relatives; send 'em some messages or something lol". Ancestry probably has a lot more features on that front, which is unsurprising since that's the sort of thing Ancestry was doing long before they even offered DNA sequencing kits like 23andMe does. I don't know if I'd characterize that as 23andMe "giving up", though; more that it's good enough for a product that never intended to enter the genealogy software market in the first place.
Acknowledging Ancestry.com are well ahead of the market here, but I never got their appeal of finding some long-lost second cousins... basically strangers, and saying, "hey, isn't it fascinating that we share some arbitrary level of common genetic makeup". If some randomer reached out via email to me doing this big reveal I'd be "thanks, but into the spam folder with you".
Is there any reason to think the company is worth $4.7B or whatever ($9.30/share)? If so the stock is a steal at its current price and we should all buy lots. But can the market be THAT wrong?
That doesn't mean the market is wrong, it means the market thinks it will continue to be run ineffectively.
The comment further implies this is on purpose in order to buy the company cheaply.
Yes. Historic examples abound of the market being that wrong. People can and have made fortunes by finding those opportunities.
Which is different from is the market that wrong in this case?
Hint: regulatory crisis, Suzanne Trimbath, failure to deliver shares, naked shorting, Tesla shortsqueeze, VW shortsqueeze, UBS's and Swiss gov's 50 year secret, etc.
That's not entirely correct. It was two days after. ;)
• https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
There's also this, on the same day:
• https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
Even considering all FDA limitations, I cannot understand how bad their genetic risk scores are.
They have talent, they have lots of customers and data. This is a position other companies, like deCODE, would have killed to be in.
It's quite possible there was no plan at all...
(sorry, it takes a while to load but wired has killed most of their long-term links)
IMHO she and Avey were just naive about the actual science and business of using genomic information for drug discovery. Remember, around the time the company started, the human genome had only recently been sequenced and Craig Venter was trying to capitalize on that, and lots of folks figured it would quickly turn into a multi-billion dollar market.
On the other hand, the product is quite good at finding relatives (identity by descent) and to be honest I wish they'd run 23&me as just that service, without the medical angle. My father did 23&Me mainly to figure out more about his ancestry, but also it helped a number of children conceived via IVF (he had provided a sample for fertility testing many years before) identify and contact him (I can't even imagine what the experience was like; to me, it's just a bunch of half-siblings I didn't know about)
- lying about growth
- pushing out the cofounder
- never making a profit
- hack that went undiscovered for months
About the only area she's had success is raising money and that's in large part thanks to being a member of the Silicon Valley elite.
"Good luck ......" or so.
selling the smallest amount of share possible for the highest amount you can get can easily balloon the "paper" value of a company, but that money doesn't really exist anywhere.
it will change when things go public, but often the initial price is based on some vapourous guess like this...
And given that 23andme currently has a market cap 1/20th DJT (Trump Media & Technology Group Corp) -- a firm that makes less revenue than a variety store yet has huge losses -- I wouldn't really say it's "worth so much".
I have always felt as if 23andMe was just her pet lil project and it doesn't matter if its ever profitable or not.
Use has also dropped, no? There's serious questions about long term revenue generation. Ancestry.com doesn't require selling your genetic code to collaborate on geneology.
Despite the promising drug development news, the CEO signaled last month that she was willing to let public investors get hosed, with a low ball take-private offer of $0.40/share. I believe this pissed both public investors and the board members off. I'm not sure if the positive phase 2 results were icing on the cake.
Quite honestly this company is a ripe target for acquisition by a biopharma company like GSK or Roche.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23andMe
So the issue is not tying it to your online identity, but rather them keeping a resource which becomes more valuable as the time goes on. So why is that an issue... most obviously because of genetic predisposition. There is always a temptation to sell diseases you are predisposed to insurers (and maybe employers... ugh). After that you can imagine someone figuring that genetics affects any number of things (sugar / weight / addiction) and sell that to advertisers...
The film Gattaca covers how this could lead to a sort of night are society pretty well, I highly recommend it.
It also makes it much much harder to use the data for clinical research.
Human brains when generating 'random' numbers: https://xkcd.com/221/
> Once a month company publishes one giant zip with all the monthly result where you find your file by that random number you wrote.
Given how much of our appearance is due to genetics, that's basically all the harm with none of the convenience.
Fortunately, contemporary humans have access to computers, which can generate random numbers for them free of charge.
>Given how much of our appearance is due to genetics, that's basically all the harm
I can't fathom your concept of "harm"; and neither, I think, would any prospective customer of this service.
Frankly I find this lack of accountability utterly repulsive. Anything this leadership touches is poison to me
> Through a mechanism called acceptance by silence or inaction, 23andMe stipulated that customers must explicitly tell the company they disagree with the new terms within 30 days of being notified of the changes or they will be locked into the terms automatically.
> After the attack, hackers published around 1 million data points about users with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and information about more than 300,000 users with Chinese heritage.
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/07/23andme-terms-of-service-up...
I just got a notification from some health services company that my and my toddlers data was accessed. Including medical history, diagnoses, payment details, SSN, birthday. Why was this not encrypted? Given the world today, this is negligent. The government should be able to disolve the company and give the money to the victims.
If there was a willful disregard for "common security and privacy standards", criminal charges against the executive team.
You want my personal life data? It comes with steep personal risk.
And…? You’re going to try and give me credit monitoring when I literally have 2 overlapping credit monitoring offers from the other companies that leaked my data?
I feel you, but my understanding is without clear monetary impact, its hard to collect any amount of money from these companies. Even if you experience identity theft, whose to say this vs one of the other data leaks was the issue.
One, corporate death penalties are nonsense. They’re a distraction from fines.
Two, what would America pay for its adversaries to enact such a policy. Automatic self destruct for the entire data sector.
The ironic thing is: why pay for their data now when it's out there already?
Sounds like they played themselves
The data was retrieved via credential stuffing, which is trying username/email and password combinations from other data breaches.
It can be argued that 23andMe should have had stricter login requirements (e.g. require MFA, require longer passwords) and by failing to do so they were responsible for the leaked data. Or you can argue that the users didn't protect their own data since they didn't use long, secure passwords that were unique per website.
I want to get my genetic data, but, like obviously I don't want to go through one of these services where they ingest all that data and keep it around forever. Honestly, I'd like to be the only person with access to it and I can destroy it at will.
Tough requirements, I know.
Anyways, do you know of any services that meet those reqs? Any good DIY ideas?
Again, thanks for the AMA
If you use 23andMe, and request data deletion, they will do a best effort to delete the data. It's part of their GDPR requirement. When I was there, I worked on this project and they put a lot of effort into it. A big chunk of engineering org focused GDPR compliance for a month or two. They definitely don't intentionally keep data around if you request deletion.
The one caveat is that data deletion is hard, and its possible that some gets accidentally retained. I left the company over 5 years ago, so I don't know how good their deletion process is now.
One final note: to keep costs low, 23andMe doesn't look at your whole genome. They only look at a handful of "SNPs" in your genome that are known to be significant. If you've heard how we share 99.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, this is what they're basing this on. They look at the <0.5% of DNA that commonly varies between humans.
The reason I mention this is that, if you're very interested in your DNA sequencing, you may want to opt for a higher cost service that does full genome analysis. I don't know any names but I believe there are some DNA services that do this.
However they sold access to the data to a bug pharma company (GSK). This was widely publicized. Not sure if that counts: GSK had some ability to look at the data but didn’t have an on premise copy of it.
Also, I worked on the GDPR deletion project. I can attest that they do best effort to delete your data when your request that. At least when I was there, this was the case. One caveat is for coding errors, oversights and bugs.
Many people sold during internal private liquidity events, and they did well. If you joined early you did well.
I ended up making a few 10s of thousands. Not the 100s it would have taken to compensate for the low pay for all those years. And I probably did better than most by selling what I could when I could. Most people weren't in the money at all.
Maybe if you timed the market perfectly you could have done well. I don't know that anyone did.
When I was there, people were pretty confident in this bet. They had just signed a huge deal with GSK, so it seemed to be going well. There wasn't widespread dissent at the time (~2016-2017). I imagine its different now that the stock price has crashed over 10x.
The company did follow Ancestry.com pretty closely. Ancestry did not bet heavily on genomics. Instead, they bet heavily on a subscription model and focused more on consumer interest in their ancestors. This has worked out a lot better for them than 23andMe.
FWIW, I agree it's obvious in retrospect that pharma was a bad bet. Leadership should have made better decisions.
St Jude Children’s Research Hospital routinely genotypes/sequences children before drug treatments to optimize initial doses. It makes a huge difference in outcomes for most cancer patients.
But chronic age-related diseases that older individuals care about most are too complicated and too strongly affected by environmental factors to be well predicted by low coverage sequencing or genotyping platforms. Even deep sequencing and perfect telomere-to-telomere personal genome assemblies (still about a $10,000 to 20,000 effort) will not be sufficient. You really need the patient’s full history and deep omics data. Michael P Snyder and colleagues at Stanford are getting close to this type of “future preventive health care” with a focus on type 2 diabetes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=michael+mo+stanford&so...
Polygenic risk scores based in simple GWAS results and additive genetic models are uninformative (or minimally useful) wrt clinical care for complex diseases—even those that have moderate heritability. There are simple way too many variables, too many undefined gene-by-environmental effects, and too many non-additive effects (epistasis). Polygenic risk scores typically account for less than 20% of variance in disease traits.
Coming around full circle though—-these platforms ARE useful for pharmacogenetic predictions of initial metabolic processing of drugs—- getting us closer to the right dose the first time.
And the SNP genotypes generated by 23andMe are also valuable predictors for a subset of variants that contribute to nearly monogenic disorders.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-23andme-going-under-...
Disclaimer: 23andMe customer and genomesdao holder.