Popular DNA Testing Company Signs $300 Million Deal With Big Pharmaceutical Company
It might be time for people to reconsider before they spit in a tube. Online genetic testing services are wildly popular. Many people use services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com to learn about their ancestral pasts. Many also use these services to gain more profound insights into their biological makeup, which is often used to assess risk for degenerative diseases, such as cancer. This information offers use for more trivial insights, such as a person’s rate of metabolism in concern with substances like caffeine.
Pharmaceutical companies with access to such genetic information would be able to develop new products in more efficient ways.
GlaxoSmithKline, seeking to take advantage of just that, has announced a four year deal with 23andMe that allows them access to everyone’s genetic information for precisely the purposes pertaining to drug research.