Regeneron is to pay $256 million in cash to acquire “substantially all” of 23andMe’s assets, including its massive biobank of around 15 million customer genetic samples and data.

  • bblkargonaut@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I honestly don’t know what they will do with snp data. These investors and VCs have been running scare peace articles for the last two years to drive the company into bankruptcy so that it could be sold and the data harvested. But I honestly think people are really overestimating the value of a dataset showing how different people are from a standard template. It’s good for ancestry and correlations but people forget they didn’t fully sequence samples. I fully expect the news cycle to change once they figure this out as they try to get people to resubmit DNA for nextgen sequencing, so they can try to salvage their investment.

    • Zenith@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      I think it’s weird you’ve made the assumption these professionals buying this haven’t already considered the things you’ve said… like that’s all looked at during the acquisition process

    • Bravo@eviltoast.org
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      4 days ago

      I’ve not submitted my DNA to any genealogy sites for testing, but what annoys me about all this is that in order to get as much info about my family tree as possible (for posterity and confirming theorized connections) I SHOULD be testing my parents’s DNA because the oldest family members are the best for connecting to distant relatives, and my parents aren’t gonna live forever. But I can’t get them (or myself) tested, because of considerations like this. This shouldn’t have to be a consideration. But it is, because of greedy bastards and the gombeen politicians who allow stuff like this to be legal.

      • bblkargonaut@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        If you really want to get your parents sequenced for your own personal use without it going into a database it’ll cost you about $500 per sample (cheaper if you know someone who can extract the DNA for you). You’ll get a set of fastq files for the reads that will cover almost their entire genome that you can then use with public databases or just store for future use. Another option is to sign up for a university study but you’ll have to be comfortable with their data use.