I would have thought they were pretty well positioned to find new targets for currently untreatable diseases. But maybe they don't quite have the capacity needed to target specific diseases and/or data not granular and clean enough, or not enough capital/runway suitable for that kind of stuff. If they had the sequences for people with diseases such as alzeimers/Parkinson, they could just look for common mutations and see what specifically it affects
It is not like they are doing real genomics. It’s devilishly hard to find genes responsible for conditions like schizophrenia, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, etc. The last thing you need is mountains of low quality data.
Attempting to discover drugs is a proven way to make a small fortune by starting with a large fortune. Everything north of the Charles River in Boston would vanish if people stopped believing though.
I don't think 23andme's strongest asset point would be in direct drug discovery, but rather in helping target sub-populations for clinical trials. The SNP data that 23andme has is relatively low quality compared to proper sequencing, but (combined with their survey data) is probably at least as good, or better information available for typical clinical trial planning or screening.
> I don't think 23andme's strongest asset point would be in direct drug discovery, but rather in helping target sub-populations for clinical trials
Was there an issue with targeting sub-populations for clinical trials beforehand?
At an ELI5 level, if you're hoping your drug candidate will help cure disease X, you sign up patients with disease X to join your clinical trial. That's not the hard part!
The two (related) cases where you'd perhaps want genetic information is:
a) If you suspect there is a significant pharmacogenetics component to what you are studying (or related to disease progression).
b) You're working on something preventative.
From a previous job I worked at (we made PCR tests), there was interest on screening for APOE genotypes to enrich an Alzheimer's drug trial - drug maker believed that APOE genotype would have a significant impact on drug performance.
But you're absolutely right that you can often (usually?) do 'enough' enriching without genetic information.
My understanding is, ideally your clinical trial manages to capture or balance out the different potential factors in genetic variation.
An example of this is when they tested the covid vaccine, they wanted to make sure they had enough participation from African American and other ethnicities since these were usually under represented in clinical trials relative to the population, and there are sometimes subtle variations in the way peoples body respond to drugs depending on their race.
> I would have thought they were pretty well positioned to find new targets for currently untreatable diseases
To find new targets yes but to develop a drug to market (and revenue/profit) takes 10-15 years. Even a drug to a state that gets approved for human testing seems beyond what they could do themselves without so much funding it would wipe out the existing shareholders. Selling to/Partnering with other drug companies with targets they've discovered/IP from DNA etc would seem more realistic.
I would say target discovery is definitely no less important than drug discovery though. Biology is so complex, for a lot of diseases we aren't even sure the targets and pathways are valid. But then again, as per another commenter, I guess it's much harder than it seems, and probably not as easy to monetize as a drug
