GeneHub Wants to Sell Whole Genomes Direct to Consumer

Update 9/25/2014: GeneHub's Kickstarter campaign has ended almost as soon as it started. For more, see Bio-IT World's news brief. 

By Bio-IT World Staff 

September 24, 2014 | San Francisco-based GeneHub has plans to become the first company selling whole genome sequences to all comers, and launched a Kickstarter campaign this week to raise the funds it needs to get started. The company says it has already negotiated with multiple research institutions running Illumina HiSeq X Ten sequencing systems to sequence DNA extracted from customers' spit samples, and by promising bulk orders, has arranged a price of $3,490 per genome.

If GeneHub were to get off the ground, it would offer by far the most extensive raw DNA data on the market for ordinary customers, although Illumina has made whole genomes available at certain exclusive events. (Purists will point out that neither GeneHub nor Illumina can quite promise a whole genome, thanks to the limitations of the HiSeq instrument in certain difficult regions of the genome, and the fact that reads will be mapped to a reference genome and not assembled from scratch, masking large structural variations.) However, GeneHub will differ from other consumer services like 23andMe or Ancestry.com in not offering any interpretations of customers' data. Users interested in getting insights into their ancestry, health, or genetic quirks would need to find or develop tools to dig through their data, which will be delivered in a form "similar to a VCF file." This may (or may not) help GeneHub escape the regulatory concerns that have trailed other direct-to-consumer genetic testing services.

GeneHub is seeking $125,000 to launch its service, enough to generate the bulk orders needed to start sequencing. Higher levels of backing will be funneled to developing a more powerful platform, with web hosting of customers' data, automatic mapping to public databases of genetic variants, and tools for comparing genomes against each other.

While whole genome sequencing on demand is a powerful concept, GeneHub's service, at least in its first iteration, is likely to appeal only to hardcore genetic enthusiasts who are prepared to wrangle with complex bioinformatics pipelines in order to analyze their own data. Still, there are at least a few such customers waiting out there: as of this writing, one backer has pledged enough support to have his or her genome sequenced if the service does ultimately launch.