23andMe CEO Goes Beyond “Wall Of A White Coat”

By Benjamin Ross

January 15, 2018 | Speaking at the 36^th annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, 23andMe’s CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki reflected on the scope of the “1 billion+ phenotypes” within 23andMe’s dataset.

“I sometimes have to repeat myself a few times where all of [the drug compounds currently developed by the company] came from our data,” she said. “All of it is crowdsourced, consumer-generated data.”

The co-founder of 23andMe was proud of the company’s progress and what it has added to the genetics space, especially when it comes to a conversation about race and identity in genetic testing.

“We’ve really hit a tipping point of broad acceptance of genetic information, and it’s not just genetics, it’s the digital world,” she said. “People are tracking their own information, with this idea that the consumer is getting a lot of their own information... The consumer movement has definitely picked up.”

Wojcicki believes the days of patients not wanting to divulge their health data are gone and the industry needs to reflect that shift in order to address the need patients have of taking control of their own health.

“What we’ve tapped into is this motivation where people want to talk about themselves. They want to talk about their health, and they have a genuine interest in themselves,” she said. “Privacy is about choice, it’s not about not sharing.”

The result of that motivation is that people actively pursue a change in their behavior, Wojcicki said. However, the potential of acting on that change, whether through genetic counseling or another branch of healthcare, is stopped short when the customers go to their doctor with their information.

“[Their doctor] wound up being a dead end,” she said. “That’s what bothers me a lot of the times in medicine, where a lot of it is behind the wall of a white coat. If you really want to make healthcare more affordable and accessible, you can’t have a physician gatekeeper for everything.”

Wojcicki says that this mindset is why 23andMe has almost no partnerships with hospitals, but instead has partnerships with almost every retail outlet, including Walgreens, Target, and even Best Buy.

Branching Out To Drug Discovery

Over the past few years 23andMe has been extending their platform to drug discovery, beginning in 2015 with the creation of their therapeutics group and the appointment of Richard Scheller, a former executive at Genetech, as chief science officer and head of therapeutics to lead it.

“My hope is that we come back here in 10 years and we can say with confidence and with data that we can actually do drug discovery more efficiently than the rest of the industry because we start with a human genetic database,” Wojcicki said.

Wojcicki is hopeful that the move toward drug discovery will result in making healthcare more efficient. “The mission of the company was always not just a consumer business, and not just a data business for the sake of data,” she said. “We’ve really now homed in on this ability to go through that data and turn that into what we hope to be novel therapeutics.”

Early last year, the FDA made a groundbreaking decision to allow 23andMe to directly sell genetic tests for disease to consumers, something Wojcicki is proud of pioneering. She reflected on the experience of dealing with the FDA and its 2013 moratorium. “[The FDA] is filled with scientists, and what scientists seek is data... It’s not that scary to work with them. They have a lot of reasonable questions and you just have to have the data to prove it.”

This data comes in handy when in the face of pushback on the federal level, Wojcicki says, as in November of last year, when New York senator Chuck Schumer called for scrutiny of the private practices of consumer DNA testing companies like 23andMe.

“Conflict is not something we’ve ever stayed away from,” Wojciki said in reaction to Schumer’s statement. “Part of what we want to do is make sure that we’re transparent with our customers about exactly what they’re doing. We’re always open to discussions with lawmakers, and I have a fabulous regulatory team. We’re ready and willing to engage.”

Looking at the horizon toward other global regulations, such as the EU’s forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation, Wojcicki spoke about the nuances of managing the varying degrees of restrictions as 23andMe moves into the space of clinical trial enrollment. Because of the simplicity of translation, the company is working with English-speaking countries. “We’ve seen that when you focus you can actually start to get critical mass of people who understand and it’s normalized,” she said.