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The CEO of the world’s leading DNA sequencing company says he knows how to finally get consumers interested in their genomes: by creating an enormous app store for genetic information.
Illumina said that along with Warburg Pincus and Sutter Hill Ventures it was investing $100 million in a new company called Helix to make consumer genomics part of the Internet mainstream.
Illumina’s CEO, Jay Flatley, said in an interview that Helix will subsidize the cost of decoding people’s genomes in hopes of spurring the creation of consumer apps that will draw on the DNA data repeatedly. “You saw what happened with the Apple app store: it just unleashed the consumer side because apps are so cheap to make,” says Flatley, who will be chairman of the new company.
So far, interest by consumers in genomics has been fairly tepid. Who do you know whose genome has been sequenced? The problem is that for healthy people, the genome just isn’t that important.
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So how do you get consumers to participate? The idea behind Helix is to make it pay-as-you-go.
Here’s how it might work. Say you download an app from a Helix partner to find out if you have a specific genetic variant, for example the “speed gene,” known to be possessed by many athletes (nicely described here by 23andMe). And imagine that app costs $20. You send in a spit sample; Helix will return just that information to you through the app.
Read full, original post: Inside Illumina’s Plans to Lure Consumers with an App Store for Genomes
